No. 168 Supplement 


Price, 15 Cents 


The Duties of Man 




FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY 

London New York Toronto 



the STANDARD LIBRARY. Subscription Price, $2.00 per year. 

Issued Quarterly. Entered at the Post-office, Nov. 28, 1892. 

New York, as second-class matter. 











WIT, WISDOM, AND 
PHILOSOPHY 

OF 

Jean Paul Fred Richter. 

Edited by Giles P. Hawley. 

12mo, Cloth, 228 pp. Price, $1.00, Postage Free. 


Some of the ablest thinkers of the century 
have been eager to confess their debt to Richter 
for inspiration, rich suggestiveness, and subtle 
analysis. This volume of selections has been 
made wiih excellent taste and discrimination, 
and displays to advantage the range of Richter’s 
thought and imagination. It will be prized by 
all who love the companionship of genius. 


Preface. 

Introduction. 

Nature. 

Art. 

Society. 

Friendship. 


Contents. 
Love. 
Marriage. 
Happiness. 
Sorrow, 
Discipline. 
Character. 
Education. 


Authorship. 

Satirical. 

Charity. 

Time 

Imagination. 

Religion. 


“ Richter has been called an intellectual Colossus. 
His faculties are of gigantic mould. He has an in¬ 
tellect vehement, rugged, irascible, c.-.'^ing in 
pieces the hardest problems, piercing the ^ost 
hidden and grasping the most distant. He has a 
fancy literally unexampled for exuberance. It pours 
its treasures with a lavishness which knows no limit. 
He, moreover, is a humorist from his inmost soul.”— 
Thomas Carlyle. _ 

FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, 

30 Lafayette Place, New York. 

























AN ESSAY ON 


THE DUTIES OF MAN 


ADDRESSED TO WORKINGMEN 


WRITTEN IN 1844 AND 1858 


BY 

JOSEPH MAZZINI 


REPRINTED BT PERMISSION OF 

MRS. EMILIE ASHURST VENTURI 

Editor of “ The Life and Writings of Joseph Mazzini” 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES 


TSTetn Yorfc 

FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY 

London and Toronto 





Wr' 



















































/ 


























* 


















MRS. Edwin C. Dinwiddle 
Aug. 6. 1935 



0 o 

t > % 












\ 
















y r s 


FT MEADE 

4BJ 

220 

Copy 1 



CONTENTS. 


Chapter I. 

PAGES. 

Introduction—1844... 


Chapter II. 

God... 

- 21-32 

Chapter III. 

The Law..... 

---- 33-43 

Chapter IV. 

Duties Towards Humanity. 

— 44-56 

Chapter V. 

Duties Towards your Country—1858- 

57-63 

Chapter VI. 

Duties Towards the Family... 

l 

1 

l 

i 

CN 

1 

*^1 

Chapter VII. 

Duties Towards Yourselves. 

— 72-83 

« 

• 

Chapter VIII. 

Liberty. 












IV CONTENTS. 

Chapter IX. PAG hs. 

Education. 93-ioj 

Chapter X. 

Association. Progress. 102-109 

Chapter XI. 

The Economical Question. 110-136 

Chapter XII. 

Conclusion.. 137-146 






AN ESSAY 


ON 

THE DUTIES OF MAN. 

ADDRESSED TO WORKINGMEN. 


CHAPTER I. 

INTRODUCTION. 

1844. 

I intend to speak to you of your duties. I intend 
to speak to you, according to the dictates of my heart, 
of the holiest things we know; to speak to you of 
God, of Humanity, of the Fatherland, and the Family. 

Listen to me in love, as I shall speak to you in 
love. My words are words of conviction, matured 
by long years of study, of experience, and of sorrow. 
The duties which I point out to you I have striven, 
and shall strive while I live, to fulfill so far as I have 
the power. I may err, but my error is not of the 
heart. I may deceive myself, but I will not deceive 
you. Listen to me, then, fraternally; judge freely 
among yourselves whether I speak trutli or error. 
If it seems to you I speak error, leave me; but follow 
me and act according to my teachings, if you believe 
me the apostle of truth. To err is misfortune, and 
deserving of commiseration; but to know the truth 
and fail to regulate our actions according to its teach- 



6 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


ings is a crime condemned alike by Heaven and 
earth. 

Wherefore do I speak to you of your duties before 
speaking to you of your rights l Wherefore, in a 
Society wherein all, voluntarily or involuntarily, tend 
to oppress you; wherein the exercise of so many of 
the rights that belong to man is continually denied 
to you; wherein your portion is suffering, and all 
that which men call happiness is for other classes— 
do I speak to you of self-sacrifice rather than of con¬ 
quest l of virtue, of moral improvement, and of edu- 
tioii, rather than of material well-being? 

This is a question which I am bound to answer 
clearly before I go any further, because this is pre¬ 
cisely the point which constitutes the difference be¬ 
tween the school to which I belong and many others 
now existing in Europe; and also because this is a 
question that naturally arises in the vexed mind of 
the suffering workingman. 

“ We are the slaves of labour—poor and unhappy; speak 
to us of ?naterial improvement , of liberty , of happiness. 
Tell us if we are doomed to suffer forever ; if we are 
never to enjoy in our turn. Preach duty to our employ¬ 
ers; to the classes above us , who treat us like machines , 
and monopolize the sources of well-being , which , in jus¬ 
tice, belong to all men. Speak to us of our rights; tell 
us how to gain them. Speak to us of our strength; let 
us first obtain a recognized social and political existence; 
then itideed you may talk to us of our duties.” 

So say too many workingmen, and they follow doc¬ 
trines and join associations corresponding to such 
thoughts and desires; forgetful, however, of one 
thing, and that is, that these very doctrines to which 


INTRODUCTION. 


7 


they still appeal have been preached during the last 
fifty years, without resulting in any, the slightest, 
material improvement in the condition of the work¬ 
ingman. 

All that has been achieved or attempted in the cause 
of progress and improvement in Europe during the 
last fifty years, whether against absolute govern¬ 
ments or the aristocracy of birth, has been attempted 
in the name of the Rights of Man and of Liberty , as the 
means of that well-being which has been regarded as 
the end and aim of life. All the acts of the great French 
Revolution, and of all of those revolutions which 
succeeded and imitated it, were a consequence of the 
“ Declaration of the Rights of Afan.” All the works 
of those philosophers, whose writings prepared the 
way for that Revolution, were founded upon a theory 
of Liberty, and of making known to every individual 
his Rights. The doctrines of all the Revolutionary 
schools preached that man was born for happiness; 
that he had a right to seek happiness by every means 
in his power; and that no one had a right to impede 
him in that search; while he had a right to over¬ 
throw whatever obstacles he met in his path to¬ 
wards it. 

And all those obstacles were overthrown; liberty 
was achieved. In many countries it lasted for years; 
in some it exists even yet. 

bias the condition of the people improved ? Have 
the millions who live by the daily labour of their 
hands acquired any, the smallest amount, of the 
promised and desired well-being? No; the condition 
of the people is not improved. On the contrary, in 
most countries it has even deteriorated; and here, 


8 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


especially, where I write, 1 the price of the necessaries 
of life has continually augmented, the wages of work¬ 
ingmen in many branches of industry have progres¬ 
sively diminished, while the population has increased. 
In almost all countries the condition of the working¬ 
man has become more uncertain, more precarious, 
while those crises which condemn thousands of work¬ 
ingmen to a certain period of inertia have become 
more frequent. 

The annual increase of emigration from country to 
country, and from Europe to other parts of the world, 
and the ever-increasing number of benevolent insti¬ 
tutions, of poor’s rates, and other precautions against 
mendicity, suffice to prove this. They indicate that 
public attention is continually being attracted to the 
sufferings of the people; but their inefficiency visibly 
to diminish those sufferings demonstrates an equally 
progressive augmentation of the misery of the classes 
in whose behalf they endeavour to provide. 

And nevertheless in these last fifty years the sources 
of social wealth and the mass of material means of 
happiness have been continually on the increase. 
Commerce, surmounting those frequent crises which 
are inevitable in the absolute absence of all organiza¬ 
tion, has achieved an increase of power and activity, 
and a wider sphere of operation. Communication 
has almost everywhere been rendered rapid and 
secure, and hence the price of produce has decreased 
in proportion to the diminished cost of transport. 
On the other hand, the idea that there are rights in- 


1 England. It must be borne in mind that this and the three 
succeeding chapters were written in 1844. 



INTRODUCTION. 


9 


herent to human nature is now generally admitted 
and accepted—hypocritically and in words at least-— 
even by those who seek to withhold those rights. 
Why, then, has not the condition of the people im¬ 
proved? Why has the consumption of produce, instead 
of being equally distributed among all the Members of 
European Society, become concentrated in the hands 
of a few, of a class forming a new aristocracy? Why 
has the fresh impulse given to industry and com¬ 
merce resulted, not in the well-being of the many, 
but in the luxury of a few? 

The answer is clear to those who look closely into 
things. Men are the creatures of education, and 
their actions are but the consequence of the principle 
of education given to them. The promoters of revo¬ 
lutions and political transformations have hitherto 
founded them all on one idea, the idea of the rights 
pertaining to the individual. Those revolutions 
achieved Liberty —individual liberty, liberty of edu¬ 
cation, liberty of belief, liberty of commerce, liberty 
in all things and for all men. 

But of what use were rights when acquired by 
men who had not the means of exercising them? Of 
what use was mere liberty of education to men who 
had neither time nor means to profit by it? Of what 
use was mere liberty of commerce to those who pos¬ 
sessed neither merchandise, capital, nor credit? 

In all the countries wherein these principles were 
proclaimed, Society was composed of the small num¬ 
ber of individuals who were possessors of the land, 
of capital, and of credit, and of the vast multitude 
who possessed nothing but the labour of their hands, 
and were compelled to sell that labour to the first 


IO 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


class on any terms, in order to live. For such men, 
compelled to spend the whole day in material and 
monotonous exertion, and condemned to a continual 
struggle against hunger and want, what was liberty 
but an illusion, a bitter irony? 

The only way to prevent this state of things would 
have been for the upper classes voluntarily to con¬ 
sent to reduce the hours of labour, while they in¬ 
creased its remuneration; to bestow an uniform and 
gratuitous education upon the multitude; to render 
the instruments of labour accessible to all, and create 
a credit for workmen of good capacity and of good in¬ 
tentions. 

Now, why should they have done this? Was not 
well-being the end and aim of life? Was not pros¬ 
perity the one thing desired by all? Why should 
they diminish their own enjoyments in favour of others? 
“ Let those help themselves who can. When Society 
has secured to each individual the free exercise of 
those rights which are inherent in human nature, it 
has done all it is bound to do. If there be any one 
who, from some fatality of his own position, is un¬ 
able to exercise any of these rights, let him resign 
himself to his fate, and not blame others.” 

It was natural they should speak thus, and thus in 
fact they spake. And this mode of regarding the 
poor by the privileged classes soon became the mode 
in which individuals regarded one another. Each 
man occupied himself with his own rights and the 
amelioration of his own position, without seeking to 
provide for others; and when those rights clashed 
with the rights of others, the result was a state of 
war—a war, not of blood, but of gold and craft; less 


INTRODUCTION. 


11 

manly than the other, but equally fatal; a relentless 
war in which those who possessed means inexorably 
crushed the weak and inexpert. 

In this state of continual warfare, men were edu¬ 
cated in selfishness and the exclusive greed of material 
well-being. Mere liberty of belief had destroyed all 
community of faith ; mere liberty of education gen¬ 
erated moral anarchy. Mankind, without any com¬ 
mon bond, without unity of religious belief or aim, 
bent upon enjoyment and naught beyond, sought 
each and all to tread in their own path, little heeding 
if, in pursuing it, they trampled upon the bodies of 
their brothers—brothers in name, but enemies in fact. 
This is the state of things we have reached at the 
present day, thanks to the theory of rights. 

Rights no doubt exist ; but when the rights of one 
individual happen to clash with those of another, how 
can we hope to reconcile and harmonize them, if we 
do not refer to something which is above all rights ? 
And when the rights of an individual, or of many in¬ 
dividuals, clash with the rights of the country, to what 
tribunal shall we appeal ? 

If the right to the greatest possible amount of hap¬ 
piness exist in all human beings, how are we to solve 
the question between the workingman and the manu¬ 
facturer? If the right to existence is the first inviol¬ 
able right of every man, who shall demand the 
sacrifice of that existence for the benefit of other 
men ? 

Will you demand it in the name of the country, of 
Society, of the multitude, your brothers? 

What is their country to those who hold the theory 
I describe, if it be not the spot wherein their indi- 


12 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


vidual rights are most secure? What is Society but 
an assemblage of men who have agreed to bring the 
power of the many in support of the rights of each ? 

And you, who for fifty years have been preaching 
to the individual that Society is constituted for the pur¬ 
pose of securing to him the exercise of his rights, how can 
you ask him to sacrifice them all in favour of that 
Society, and submit, if need be, to ceaseless effort, to 
imprisonment or exile, for the sake of improving it? 
After having taught him by every means in your 
power that the end and aim of life is happiness, how 
can you expect him to sacrifice both happiness and 
life itself to free his country from foreign oppression, 
or to produce some amelioration in the condition of a 
class to which he does not belong? After you have 
preached to him for years in the name of material 
interest , can you pretend that he shall see wealth and 
power within his own reach and not stretch forth his 
hand to grasp them, even though to the injury of his 
fellow-men? 

* * * * * * 

Who shall persuade the man, believing solely in 
the theory of rights, that he is bound to strive for 
the common good, and occupy himself in the develop¬ 
ment of the social idea? Suppose he should rebel; 
suppose he should feel himself strong enough to say 
to you: “ I break the social bond; my tendencies and 
my faculties invite me elsewhere; I have a sacred, an 
inviolable right to develop those tendencies and fac¬ 
ulties, and I choose to be at war with the rest;” what 
answer can you make him within the limits of the 
Doctrine of Rights? What right have you, merely as 
a majority, to compel his obedience to laws which do 


INTRODUCTION. 


13 


not accord with his individual desires and aspirations? 
What right have you to punish him should he violate 
those laws? 

The Rights of each individual are equal; the mere 
fact of living together in Society does not create a 
single one. Society has greater power, not greater 
rights, than the individual. How, then, will you 
prove to the individual that he is bound to confound 
his will in the will of his brothers, whether of coun¬ 
try or of humanity? 

By means of the prison or the executioner? 

Every Society that has existed hitherto has em¬ 
ployed these means. 

But this is a state of war, and we need peace; this 
is tyrannical repression, and we need Education. 

EDUCATION, I have said, and my whole doctrine 
is included and summed up in this grand word. The 
vital question in agitation at the present day is a 
question of Education. We do not seek to establish 
a new order of things through violence. Any order 
of things established through violence, even though 
itself superior to the old, is still a tyranny. What we 
have to do is to propose, for the approval of the 
nation, an order of things which we believe to be 
superior to that now existing, and to educate men by 
every possible means to develop it and act in accord¬ 
ance with it. 

The theory of Rights may suffice to arouse men 
to overthrow the obstacles placed in their path by 
tyranny, but it is impotent where the object in view 
is to create a noble and powerful harmony between 
the various elements of which the nation is composed. 
With the theory of happiness as the primary aim of 


14 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


existence, we shall only produce egoists who will 
carry the old passions and desires into the new order 
of things, and introduce corruption into it a few 
montlrs after. We have, therefore, to seek a Principle 
of Education superior to any such theory, and cap¬ 
able of guiding mankind onwards toward their own 
improvement, of teaching them constancy and self- 
sacrifice, and of uniting them with their fellow-men, 
without making them dependent either on the idea 
of a single man or the force of the majority. 

This principle is DUTY. We must convince men 
that they are all sons of one sole God, and bound to 
fulfill and execute one sole law here on earth; that each 
of them is bound to live, not for himself, but for others; 
that the aim of existence is not to be more or less 
happy, but to make ourselves and others more virtu¬ 
ous ; that to struggle against injustice and error 
(wherever they exist), in the name and for the benefit 
of their brothers, is not only a right but a Duty ; a 
duty which may not be neglected without sin; the duty 
of their whole life. 

Workingmen! Brothers! Understand me well. When 
I say that the consciousness of your rights will never 
suffice to produce an important and durable progress, 
I do not ask you to renounce those rights. I merely 
say that such rights can only exist as a consequence 
of duties fulfilled, and that we must begin with ful¬ 
filling the last in order to achieve the first. And when 
Isay that in proposing happiness, well-being, or mate¬ 
rial interests, as the aim of existence, we run the risk 
of producing egoists, I do not say that you ought 
never to occupy yourselves with these ; but I do say 
that the exclusive endeavour after material interests, 


INTRODUCTION. 


1.5 


sought for, not as a means , but as an end , always leads 
to disastrous and deplorable results. 

When the ancient Romans, under the emperors, 
contented themselves with bread and a?nusements , they 
had become as abject a race as can be conceived; 
and after submitting to the stupid and ferocious rule 
of their emperors, they vilely succumbed to and were 
enslaved by their barbarian invaders. In France and 
elsewhere it has ever been the plan of the opponents 
of social progress to spread corruption by endeavour¬ 
ing to lead men’s minds away from thoughts of change 
and improvement through furthering the develop¬ 
ment of mere material activity. And shall we help 
our adversaries with our own hands ? 

Material ameliorations are essential and we will strive 
to obtain them; not, however, because the one thing 
necessary to man is that he should be well housed 
and nourished, but because you can neither acquire 
a true consciousness of your own dignity, nor achieve 
your own moral development, so long as you are 
engaged, as at the present day, in a continual strug¬ 
gle with poverty and want. 

You labour for ten or twelve hours of the day: how 
can you find time to educate yourselves ? The greater 
number of you scarcely earn enough to maintain 
yourselves and your families: how can you find means 
to educate yourselves? The frequent interruption 
and uncertain duration of your work causes you to 
alternate excessive labour with periods of idleness: 
how are you to acquire habits of order, regularity, 
and assiduity ? The scantiness of your earnings pre¬ 
vents all hope of saving a sum sufficient to be one day 
useful to your children, or to provide for the support 


16 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


of your own old age: how can you acquire habits of 
economy ? Many among you are compelled by pov¬ 
erty to withdraw your children—I will not say from 
the instruction, for what educational instruction can 
the poor wife of a workingman bestow upon her 
children ?—but from the mother’s watchfulness and 
love, in order that they may gain a few pence in the 
unwholesome and injurious labour of manufactories: 
how can children so circumstanced be developed 
under the softening influence of family affection ? 

You have no rights of citizenship, no participation 
either of election or vote, in those laws which are to 
direct your actions and govern your life: how can 
you feel the sentiment of citizenship, zeal for the 
welfare of the State, or sincere affection for its laws ? 

Your poverty frequently involves the impossibility 
of your obtaining justice like the other classes: how- 
are you to learn to love and respect justice ? Society 
treats you without a shadow of sympathy: how are 
you to learn sympathy with Society ? 

It is therefore needful that your material condition 
should be improved, in order that you may morally 
progress. It is necessary that you should labour less, 
so that you may consecrate some hours every day to 
your soul’s improvement. It is neeeful that you 
should receive such remuneration for your labour as 
may enable you to accumulate a sufficient saving to 
tranquillize your minds as to your future. And, above 
all, it is necessary to purify your souls from all 
reaction, from all sentiment of vengeance, from every 
thought of injustice, even towards those who have 
been unjust towards you. You are bound, therefore, 
to strive for all these ameliorations in your condition, 


INTRODUCTION. 


*7 


and you will obtain them; but you must seek them 
as a means, not as an end; seek them from a sense of 
duty, and not merely as a right; seek them in order 
that you may become more virtuous, not in order 
that you may be materially happy. 

If not so, where would be the difference between 
you and those by whom you have been oppressed ? 
They oppressed you precisely because they only 
sought happiness, enjoyment, and power. 

Improve yourselves ! Let this be the aim of your 
life. It is only by improving yourselves, by becom¬ 
ing more virtuous, that you can render your position 
lastingly less unhappy. Petty tyrants would arise 
among yourselves by thousands, so long as you should 
merely strive to advance in the name of material 
interests or a special social organization. A change 
of social organization is of little moment while you 
yourselves remain with your present passions and 
selfishness. Social organizations are like certain 
plants which yield either poison or medicine according 
to the mode in which they are administered. Good 
men can work good even out of an evil organization, 
and evil men can work evil out of good organizations. 

No doubt it is also necessary to improve the classes 
who now oppress you, but you will never succeed in 
doing this unless you begin by improving yourselves. 

When, therefore, you hear those who preach the 
necessity of a social transformation, declare that they 
can accomplish it solely by invoking your rights, be 
grateful to them for their good intentions, but be dis¬ 
trustful of their success. The sufferings of the poor 
are partially known to the wealthier classes ; knoivn 
but not felt . In the general indifference resulting 


2 


18 THE DUTIES OF MAN. 

from the absence of a common faith; in the selfish¬ 
ness which is the inevitable result of so many years 
spent preaching material happiness, those who do 
not suffer themselves have, little by little, become 
accustomed to regard the sufferings of others as a 
sorrowful necessity of social organization, or to leave 
the remedy to generations to come. The difficulty 
lies, not so much in convincing them, as in rousing 
them from their inertia, and inducing them, when 
once convinced, to act; to associate together, and to 
fraternize with you, in order to create such a social 
organization as shall put an end—as far as human 
possibilities allow—to your sufferings and their own 
fears. 

Now, to do this is the work of Faith; of faith in 
the mission which God has given to his human creat¬ 
ure here on earth; in the responsibility which weighs 
upon all those who fail to fulfill that mission; and in 
the Duty imposed upon all, of continual endeavour 
and sacrifice in the cause of truth. 

Any conceivable doctrine of Right and material 
happiness can only lead you to attempts which, so 
long as you remain isolated and rely solely on your 
own strength, can never succeed; and which can but 
result in that worst of crimes, a civil war between 
class and class. 

Workingmen! Brothers! When Christ came, and 
changed the face of the world, he spoke not of rights 
to the rich, who needed not to achieve them; nor to 
the poor, who would doubtless have abused them in 
imitation of the rich; he spoke not of utility nor of 
interest to a people whom interest and utility had 
corrupted; he spoke of Duty, he spoke of Love, of 



INTRODUCTION. 


l 9 


Sacrifice, and of Faith; and he said that they should be 
first among all who had contributed most by their labour 
to the good of all. 

And the words of Christ, breathed in the ear of a 
society in which all true life was extinct, recalled it 
to existence, conquered the millions, conquered the 
world, and caused the education of the human race 
to ascend one degree on the scale of progress. 

Workingmen! We live in an epoch similar to that 
of Christ. We live in the midst of a society as cor¬ 
rupt as that of the Roman Empire, feeling in our 
inmost soul the need of reanimating and transform¬ 
ing it, and of uniting all its various members in one 
sole faith, beneath one sole law, in one sole aim—the 
free and progressive development of all the faculties 
of which God has given the germ to his creatures. 
We seek the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in 
Heaven, or rather, that earth may become a prepara¬ 
tion for Heaven, and society an endeavour after the 
progressive realization of the Divine Idea. 

But Christ’s every act was the visible representa¬ 
tion of the Faith he preached; and around him stood 
apostles who incarnated in their actions the faith they 
had accepted. Be you such, and you will conquer. 
Preach duty to the classes above you, and fulfill, as 
far as in you lies, your own. Preach virtue, sacrifice 
and love; and be yourselves virtuous, loving, and 
ready for self-sacrifice. Speak your thoughts boldly, 
and make known your wants courageously; but with¬ 
out anger, without reaction, and without threats. 
The strongest menace, if indeed there be those for 
whom threats are necessary, will be the firmness, not 
the irritation, of your speech. 


20 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


While you propagate amongst your brothers the idea 
of a better future, which will secure to them educa¬ 
tion, work, its fitting remuneration, and the con¬ 
science and mission of Men, strive also to instruct and 
improve yourselves, and to educate yourselves to the 
full knowledge and practice of your duties. 

At present this is a labour rendered impossible to 
the masses in many parts of England. No plan of 
popular education can be realized alone ; a change 
both in the political and material condition of the 
people is also needed; and they who imagine that an 
educational transformation may be accomplished 
alone, deceive themselves. 

A few among you, once imbued with the true prin¬ 
ciples on which the moral, social, and political educa¬ 
tion of a people depend, will suffice to spread them 
among the millions, as a guide on their way, to pro¬ 
tect them from the sophistries and false doctrines by 
which it will be sought to lead them astray. 


CHAPTER II. 


GOD. 

The source of your duties is in God. The defini¬ 
tion of your duties is found in the Law. The pro¬ 
gressive discovery and application of this law is the 
mission of Humanity. 

God exists. I am not bound to prove this to you, 
nor shall I endeavour to do so. To me the attempt 
would seem blasphemous, as the denial appears mad¬ 
ness. 

God exists, because we exist. God lives in our 
conscience, in the conscience of Humanity. Our 
conscience invokes Him in our most solemn moments 
of grief or joy. Humanity has been able to trans¬ 
form, to disfigure, never to suppress, His holy name. 
The Universe bears witness to Him in the order, har¬ 
mony, and intelligence of its movements and its laws. 

There are, I hope, no atheists among you. Were 
there any, they would deserve pity rather than male¬ 
diction. He who can deny God either in the face of 
a starlight night, or when standing beside the tomb 
of those dearest to him, or in the presence of mar¬ 
tyrdom, is either greatly unhappy, or greatly guilty. 
The first atheist was surely one who had concealed 
some crime from his fellow-men, and who sought by 
denying God to free himself from the sole witness 
from whom concealment was impossible, and thus 


22 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


to stifle the remorse by which he was tormented. Or 
perhaps the first atheist was a tyrant, who, having 
destroyed one-half of the soul of his brethren by 
depriving them of liberty, endeavoured to substitute 
the worship of brute force for faith in duty and eter¬ 
nal right. 

After these, from age to age, there came men, here 
and there, who taught atheism from philosophical 
aberration ; but they were few and ashamed. After 
these, in days not far removed from our own, came 
many who, from reaction against a false and absurd 
idea of God created by some tyranny or caste, denied 
God Himself ; but it was only for an instant—so great 
was the need they felt of Divinity that even they 
worshipped a Goddess of Reason and Goddess of 
Nature. 

At the present day there are many men who abhor 
all religion because they see the corruption of the 
actual creeds, and have no conception of the purity 
of the Religion of the Future ; but none of these ven¬ 
ture to declare themselves atheists. There do indeed 
exist priests who prostitute the name of God to the 
calculations of a venal self-interest, and tyrants who 
falsify His name by invoking it in support of their 
tyranny ; but because the light of the sun is often ob¬ 
scured by impure vapours, shall we deny the sun him¬ 
self, and the vivifying influence of his rays throughout 
the universe ? Because the liberty of the wicked 
sometimes produces anarchy, shall we curse the name 
of liberty itself ? 

The undying light of faith in God pierces through 
all the imposture and corruption wherewith men have 
darkened His name. Imposture and corruption pass 


GOD. 


2 3 


away ; tyrannies pass away ; but God remains, as the 
people, the image of God on earth, remains. Even 
as the people passes through slavery, poverty, and 
suffering, to achieve self-consciousness, power, and 
emancipation, step by step, so does the holy name of 
God arise above the ruins of corrupt creeds, to shine 
forth surrounded by a purer, more intense, and more 
rational form of worship. 

I do not therefore speak to you of God in order to 
demonstrate to you His existence, or to tell you that 
you are bound to worship Him ; you do worship Him 
whensoever yoii deeply feel your own life , and that of 
the fellow-beings by whom you are surrounded ; but 
in order to tell you how to worship Him, and to ad¬ 
monish you of an error that predominates in the 
classes by whom you are governed, and through their 
example influences too many of yourselves, an error 
as grave and fatal as atheism itself. 

This error is the separation, more or less apparent, 
of God from His work, from the earth upon which 
you are called to fulfill one period of your existence. 

On the one side there are men who tell you: “It is 
very true that God exists, but the only thing you can do is 
to confess His existence, and adore Him. None can com¬ 
prehend or declare the relatioji between God and your con- 
scie?ice. Reflect upon all this as much as you please , but 
neither propound your ow7i belief to your fellow-men, nor 
seek to apply it to the affairs of this-earth. 

u Politics are one thing, Religion another. Do not con¬ 
found them together. Leave all heavenly things to the 
spiritual authorities, whatever they 7/iay be, reservbig to 
yourself the right of refusing the77i your belief if they 
appear to you to betray their 77iission. Let each 7?ia7i 


24 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


believe in his own way ; the only thing about which you are 
bound to concern yourselves in common are the things of 
this world. Materialists , or Spiritualists, whichsoever you 
be, do you believe in the liberty and equality of mankind l 
do you desire the well-being of the majority ? do you believe 
in universal suffrage ? Unite together to obtain these 
things ; in order to obtain these, you will have no occasion 
to come to a common understanding about heavenly things.” 

On the other side, you have men who say to you, 
“ God exists, but He is too great, too superior to all created 
things, for you to hope to approach Him through any 
human work. The earth is of clay. Life is but a day. 
Withdraw yourselves from the first as far as possible and 
do not value the other above its worth. What are all 
earthly interests in comparison with the immortal life of 
your soul ? Think of this ! Fix your eyes on Heaven. 
What matters it how you live here below ? You are doomed 
to die, and God will judge you according to the thoughts 
you have given, not to earth, but to Him. Are you unhappy ? 
Bless the God who has sent you sorrows. Terrestrial 
existence is but a period of trial, the earth but a land of 
exile. Despise it, a?id raise yourselves above it. I?i the 
midst of sorrows, poverty, or slavery, you ca?i still turn to 
God and sanctify yourselves in adoration of Him, i?i 
prayer, and in faith in a future that will largely recom- 
pense you for having despised every worldly thing.” 

Of those who speak to you thus, the first do not 
love God, the second do not know Him. 

Say to the first that man is one. You cannot divide 
him in half, and so contrive that he shall agree with 
you in those principles which regulate the origin of 
society while he differs with you as regards his own 
origin, destiny, and law of life here below. The 


GOD. 


2 5 


world is governed by Religions. When the Indians 
really believed that some of them were born from the 
head, others from the arms, and others from the feet 
of Brahma, their Divinity, they organized their society 
by distributing mankind into castes; assigning to one 
caste an inheritance of intellectual labour, to another 
of military, and to others of servile duties; and thus 
condemned themselves to an immobility that still 
endures, and that will endure so long as belief in that 
religious principle shall last. 

When the Christians declared to the world that all 
men were the sons of God, and brethren in His name, 
all the doctrines of the legislators and philosophers 
of antiquity, tending to establish the existence of two 
races of men, availed not to prevent the abolition of 
slavery, and a consequent radical reorganization of 
Society. 

For every advance in religious belief we can point 
to a corresponding social advance in the history of 
Humanity, while the only result you can show as a 
consequence of your doctrine of indifference in mat¬ 
ters of religion is anarchy. You have been able to 
destroy; never to build up. Disprove this, if you can. 

By dint of exaggerating one of the principles 
of Protestantism—a principle which Protestantism it¬ 
self now feels the necessity of abandoning—^-by dint of 
deducing all your ideas from the sole principle of the 
independence of the individual, you have achieved— 
what? 

In commerce, you have achieved anarchy—that is 
to say, the oppression of the weak. In politics you 
have achieved liberty—that is to say, the derision of 
the weak, who have neither time, nor means, nor in- 


26 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


struction sufficient to enable them to exercise their 
rights* In morals you have achieved selfishness— 
that is to say, the isolation and ruin of the weak, who 
cannot raise themselves alone. 

But what we seek is association. 

How shall we realize this securely, unless among 
brothers, believing in the same ruling principle, united 
in the same faith, and bearing witness by the same 
name? 

What we seek is education. 

How shall we give or receive it, unless in virtue of 
a principle that sums up and expresses our common 
belief as to the origin, the aim, and the law of the life 
of mankind upon earth? 

We seek a common education. 

How shall we give or receive it without belief in a 
common faith and a common duty? 

And whence can we deduce a common duty, if not 
from the idea we form of God and our relation to 
Him? 

Doubtless universal suffrage is an excellent thing. 
It is the only legal means by which a people may 
govern itself without risk of continual violent crises. 
Universal suffrage in a country governed by a com¬ 
mon faith is the expression of the national will; but 
in a country deprived of a common belief, what can 
it be but the mere expression of the interests of those 
numerically the stronger, to the oppression of all the 
rest? 

All the political reforms achieved in countries 
either irreligious or indifferent to religion have lasted 
as long as interest allowed—no longer. On this 
point the experience of political movements in Europe 


GOD. 


27 


during the last fifty years has taught us lessons 
enough. 

To those who speak to you of heaven, and seek to 
separate it from earth, you will say that heaven and 
earth are one, even as the way and the goal are one. 
Tell us not that the earth is of clay. The earth is of 
God. God created it as the medium through which 
we may ascend to Him. The earth is not a mere 
sojourn of temptation or of expiation ; it is the 
appointed dwelling-place wherein we are bound 
to work out our own improvement and development 
and advance towards a higher stage of existence. God 
created us not to contemplate, but to act. He created 
us in His own image, and He is Thought and Action , 
or rather, in Him there is no Thought which is not 
simultaneous Action. 

You tell us to despise all worldly things, to trample 
under foot our terrestrial life, in order to concern 
ourselves solely with the Celestial; but what is our 
terrestrial life save a prelude to the Celestial—a step 
towards it? See you not that while sanctifying the 
last step of the ladder by which we must all ascend, 
by thus declaring the first accursed you arrest us on 
the way? 

The life of a soul is sacred in every stage of its 
existence; as sacred in the earthly stage as in those 
which are to follow. Each stage must be made a 
preparation for the next; every temporary advance 
must aid the gradual ascending progress of that im¬ 
mortal life breathed into us all by God Himself, as 
well as the progress of the great Entity—Humanity 
—which is developed through the labour of each and 
every individual. 


28 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


God has placed you here upon this earth. He has 
surrounded you with myriads of fellow-beings whose 
minds receive aliment from your own, whose devel¬ 
opment progresses simultaneously with your own, 
whose life is fecundated by your own. In order to 
preserve you from the dangers of isolation He has 
given you desires which you are incapable of satis¬ 
fying alone, and those dominating social instincts 
which distinguish you from the brute creation, in 
which they are dormant. He has spread around you 
a material world, magnificent in beauty and pregnant 
with life; a life—be it ever remembered—which, 
though it reveal itself by divine impulse, yet every¬ 
where awaits your labour, and modifies its manifes¬ 
tations through you, increasing in power and vigour 
in proportion to your increased activity. 

God has given you certain sympathies which are 
inextinguishable. Such are pity for those that mourn, 
and joy for those that rejoice; anger against those 
who oppress their fellow-creatures; a ceaseless yearn¬ 
ing after truth; admiration for the genius that dis¬ 
covers a new portion or form of truth; enthusiasm 
for those who reduce it to beneficial action upon man¬ 
kind; and religious veneration for those, who, failing 
to achieve its triumph, yet bear witness to it with 
their blood, and die in martyrdom: and you deny 
and reject all the indications of your mission which 
God has thus clustered around you, when you cry 
anathema on the work of His hand, and call upon us 
to concentrate all our faculties on a work of mere 
inward purification, necessarily imperfect, nay impos¬ 
sible, if sought alone. 

Does not God punish those who strive to do this ? 


GOD. 


2 9 


Is not the slave degraded ? Is not one-half of the 
soul of the poor day-labourer (doomed to consume 
the light divine in a series of physical acts unrelieved 
by a gleam of education) buried beneath its animal 
appetites, in those blind instincts which you name 
material ? Do you find more religious faith in the 
poor Russian serf than in the Pole fighting the battle 
of country and liberty? Do you find more fervent 
love of God in the degraded subject of a pope or 
despotic king than in the Lombard republicans of 
the twelfth, or Florentine republicans of the four¬ 
teenth, century ? 

“ Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty,” 
has been declared by one of the most powerful 
Apostles the world has known, and the religion he 
preached decreed the abolition of slavery. Who that 
crouches at the foot of the creature can rightly know 
and worship the Creator ? 

Yours is not a Religion. It is a sect of men who 
have forgotten their origin, forgotten the battles which 
their fathers fought against a corrupt society and 
the victories they gained in transforming the world 
which you despise, O men of contemplation ! 

The first real, earnest religious Faith that shall 
arise upon the ruins of the old worn-out creeds will 
transform the whole of our actual social organization, 
because every strong and earnest faith tends to apply 
itself to every branch of human activity; because in 
every epoch of its existence the earth has ever tend¬ 
ed to conform itself to the Heaven in which it then 
believed; and because the whole history of Humanity 
is but the repetition—in form and degree varying ac¬ 
cording to the diversity of the times—of the words 


3 ° 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


of the Dominical Christian Prayer: Thy Kingdom 
Come on Earth as it is in Heaven. 

“ Thy Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” 
Let these words—better understood and better ap¬ 
plied than in the past—be the utterance of your faith, 
your prayer, O my brothers! Repeat them, and strive 
to fulfill them. No matter if others seek to persuade 
you to passive resignation and indifference to earthly 
things, if they preach submission to every temporal 
authority, however unjust, by quoting to you—with¬ 
out comprehending them—the words, “ Render unto 
Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the 
things that are God’s.” 

Nothing is of Caesar unless it be such in conformity 
to the law of God. Caesar—that is to say, the tem- 
po'ral power of civil government—is but the adminis¬ 
trator and executive, as far as lies in its power, of the 
design of the Almighty. Whensoever it is false to its 
mission and trust, it is, I do not say your right, but 
your duty , to change it. 

For what purpose are you placed here, if it be not 
to work out the providential design in your own 
sphere and according to your means? To what pur¬ 
pose do you profess to believe in that Unity of the 
human race which is the necessary consequence 
of the Unity of God, if you do not strive to 
verify it by destroying the arbitrary divisions and 
enmities that still separate the different tribes of 
Humanity ? 

What avails it to believe in human liberty—the basis 
of human responsibility—if you do not labour to over¬ 
throw all the obstacles that impede the first and 
destroy the second? Why do we talk of fraternity, 


GOD. 


31 


while we allow any of our brothers to be trampled 
on, degraded, or despised ? 

The earth is our workshop. We may not curse it; 
we are bound to sanctify it. 

The material forces that surround us are our instru¬ 
ments of labour. We may not reject them; we are 
bound to direct them for good. But this we cannot 
do alone, without God. 

I have spoken to you of duties; I have told you 
that the consciousness of your rights will never suffice 
you as a permanent guide on the path towards per¬ 
fection; it will not even suffice to procure for you the 
continuous progressive improvement in your condi¬ 
tion which you seek and desire. 

Now, apart from God, whence can you derive duty ? 
Without God, whatsoever system you attempt to lean 
upon, you will find it has no other foundation or basis 
than Force—blind, tyrannical, brute force. 

There is no escape from this. 

Either the development of human things depends 
upon a Providential Law, which we are all bound to 
seek to discover and apply, or it is left to chance, to 
passing circumstance, and to that man who contrives 
best to turn things to account. 

We must either obey God or serve man; whether 
one man or many, matters little. 

If there be not a governing Mind, supreme over 
every human mind, what shall preserve us from the 
dominion of our fellow-men whenever they are 
stronger than ourselves ? 

If there be not one inviolable Law, uncreated by 
man, what rule have we by which to judge whether a 
given act be just or unjust ? 


3 2 


THE DtJTTES OF MAN. 


In the name of whom, or of what, shall we protest 
against inequality and oppression ? 

Without God there is no other rule than that of 
Fact , the accomplished fact, before which the mate¬ 
rialist ever bows his head, whether its name be Bona¬ 
parte or Revolution. 

How can we expect men to sacrifice themselves, or 
to suffer martyrdom in the name of our individual 
opinion ? 

Can we transform theory into practice, abstract 
principle into action, on the strength of interests 
alone ? 

Be not deceived. So long as we endeavour to teach 
sacrifice as individuals, or on whatever theory our 
mere individual intellect may suggest, we may find 
adherents in words, never in act. That cry only, 
which has resounded in all great and noble revolu¬ 
tions, the “ God wills it , God wills it,” of the Crusad¬ 
ers, will have power to rouse the inert to action, to 
give courage to the timid, the enthusiasm of sacrifice 
to the calculating, and faith to those who distrust and 
reject all mere human ideas. 

Prove to mankind that the work of progressive devel¬ 
opment to which you would call them is a part of the 
design of God, and none will rebel. Prove to them 
that the earthly duties to be fulfilled here below are 
an essential portion of their immortal life, and all the 
calculations of the present will vanish before the 
grandeur of the future. 

Without God you may compel, but not persuade; 
you may become tyrants in your turn, you cannot be 
Educators or Apostles. 




CHAPTER III. 


THE LAW. 

You live. Therefore you have a law of life. There 
is no life without its law. Whatever thing exists, 
exists in a certain method, according to certain con¬ 
ditions, and is governed by a certain law. 

The mineral world is governed by a law of aggre¬ 
gation; the vegetable world by a law of development; 
the stars are ruled by a law of motion. 

Your life is governed by a lav/ higher and nobler 
than these, even as you are superior to all other 
created earthly things. To develop yourselves, and 
act and live according to your law, is your first, or 
rather your sole, duty. 

God gave you life; God therefore gave you the 
law. God is the sole Law-giver to the human race. 
His law is the sole law you are bound to obey. 
Human laws are only good and valid in so far as they 
conform to, explain, and apply the law of God. They 
are evil whensoever they contrast with or oppose it, 
and it is then not only your right but your duty to 
disobey and abolish them. 

He who shall best explain the law of God, and best 
apply it to human things, is your legitimate ruler. 
Love him and follow him. But you have not, and 
cannot have, any Master save God himself. To ac¬ 
cept any other is to be unfaithful and rebellious to 
Him. 


3 



34 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


The foundation of all morality, therefore, the regu¬ 
lation of all your acts and duties, and the measure 
of your responsibility, is to be found in the knowl¬ 
edge of your law of life, of the law of God. It is also 
your defence against the unjust laws which the 
tyranny of one man, or many men, may seek to im¬ 
pose upon you. 

Unless you know this law, you may not pretend to 
the name or the rights of men All rights have their 
origin in a law, and while you are unable to invoke 
this law, you may be tyrants or slaves—tyrants if you 
are strong, the slaves of the stronger if you are weak 
—but naught else. 

In order to be men, you must know the law which 
distinguishes human nature from that of the animal, 
vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, and to it you must 
conform your action. Now, how are you to know 
this law? 

This is the question which humanity has ever ad¬ 
dressed to those who have pronounced the word 
Duty, and the answers are various even yet. 

Some have replied by pointing to a code, or book, 
saying: “ The whole law of morals is comprised in this 
book.” Others have said: “ Let every man interrogate 
his own conscience; he will find the definition of good and 
evil there.” Others again, rejecting the judgment of 
the individual, invoke the universal judgment, and 
declare: “ Whenever humanity is agreed in a belief, that 
belief is the truth.” 

Each and all of these are in error. And facts, un¬ 
answerable in the history of the human race, have 
proved the impotence of all these answers. 

Those who declare that the whole moral law is con- 


THE LAW. 


35 


tained in a book, or uttered by one man, forget that 
there is no single code of morals which Humanity 
has not abandoned, after an acceptance and belief of 
some centuries, in order to seek after and diffuse 
another more advanced than it; nor is there any 
special reason for supposing that Humanity will alter 
its course now. 

It will be sufficient to remind those who declare 
the conscience of the individual to be an adequate 
criterion of the just and true, that no Religion, how¬ 
ever holy, has existed without heretics, dissenters 
who dissented from conviction, and were ready to 
endure martyrdom for their conscience sake. The 
Protestant world is at the present day divided and 
subdivided into a thousand sects, all founded on the 
right of individual conscience, all eager to make war 
on one another, and perpetuating that anarchy of 
beliefs which is the sole true cause of the social and 
political disturbances that torment the peoples of 
Europe. And on the other hand, to those who reject 
the testimony of individual conscience, and invoke 
the consent of Humanity in their faith, suffice it to 
say that all the great ideas that have contributed to 
the progress of Humanity hitherto were, at their 
commencement, in oppositioji to the belief then ac¬ 
cepted by Humanity, and were preached by individ¬ 
uals whom Humanity derided, persecuted, and cru¬ 
cified. 

Each of these rules, then, is insufficient in order to 
obtain a knowledge of the law of God, of Truth. 

Yet, nevertheless, individual conscience is sacred, 
and the common consent of Humanity is sacred; and 
he who refuses to interrogate either of these deprives 


36 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


himself of one essential means of reaching truth. 
The common error hitherto has been the endeavour 
to reach truth by the help of one of these tests alone; 
an error fatal and decisive in its consequences, be¬ 
cause it is impossible to elevate individual conscience 
as the sole judge of truth without falling into anarchy; 
and it is impossible to appeal, at a given moment, 
to the general consent of Humanity without crush¬ 
ing human liberty, and producing tyranny. Thus— 
and I quote these examples in order to show how, 
far more than is generally supposed, the entire social 
edifice is founded upon these primary bases—thus 
some men have fallen into the error of organizing soci¬ 
ety solely with respect to the rights of the individ¬ 
ual, wholly forgetful of the educational mission of soci¬ 
ety; while others have based their organization solely 
on the rights of society, sacrificing the free action 
and liberty of the individual. 1 

France, after her great revolution, and (still more 
markedly) England, has taught us that the first sys¬ 
tem results in inequality and the oppression of the 
many. Communism, were it ever elevated into a 
Fact , would teach us how the second condemns soci¬ 
ety to petrifaction, by destroying alike all motive and 
all opportunity of progress. 

Thus some, in consideration of the pretended 
rights of the individual, have organized, or rather 
disorganized, society by founding it upon the sole 


1 I speak, of course, of those countries governed by a constitu¬ 
tional monarchy, and in which a certain organization of society is 
attempted. In countries despotically governed, there is no soci¬ 
ety; individual and social rights being equally sacrificed. 



THE LAW. 


37 


basis of unlimited freedom of competition; while 
others, merely regarding social unity', would give the 
government the monopoly of all the productive 
forces of the State. 

The first of these conceptions has resulted in all 
the evils of anarchy. The second would result in 
immobility and all the evils of tyranny. 

God has given you both the consent of your fellow- 
men and your own conscience, even as two wings 
wherewith to elevate yourselves towards Him. Why 
persist in cutting off one of them ? Wherefore either 
isolate yourselves from, or absorb yourselves in, the 
world ? Why seek to stifle either the voice of the 
individual, or of the human race? Both are sacred. 
God speaks through each. Whe?isoever they agree , 
whensoever the cry of your own conscience is ratified 
by the consent of Humanity, God is there. Then 
you are certain of having found the truth, for the one 
is the verification of the other. 

If your duties were merely negative, if they merely 
consisted in not doing evil, in not injuring your 
brother-men, perhaps, even in the stage of develop¬ 
ment which the least educated among you have 
reached, the voice of .conscience might suffice you for 
a guide. You are born with a tendency towards good, 
and every time you act directly contrary to the moral 
Jaw, every time you commit what mankind has 
agreed to name sin, there is a something within you 
that condemns you, a cry of reproval which you may 
conceal from others, but cannot from yourselves. 

But your most important duties are positive . It is 
not enough not to do. You are bound to act. It is 
not enough to limit yourselves to not acting against 


33 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


the Law : you are bound to act according to the Law. 
It is not enough not to do harm to your brethren: 
you are bound to do good to them. Hitherto 
morality has too often been presented to mankind in 
a form rather negative than affirmative. The inter¬ 
preters of the law have said to us: “Thou shalt not 
kill; thou shalt not steal.” Few or none have taught 
us the active duties of man, how he may be useful to 
his fellow-creatures and further the design of God 
in the creation. Yet this is the primary aim in 
morals, and no individual can reach that aim by the 
light of conscience alone. 

Individual conscience speaks in proportion to the 
education, tendencies, habits, and passions of the 
individual. The conscience of the Iroquois speaks a 
different language to that of the enlightened Euro¬ 
pean of the nineteenth century. The conscience of 
the freeman suggests duties which the conscience of 
the slave*does not even imagine. Ask the poor Lom¬ 
bard or Neapolitan peasant, whose only teacher of 
morality has been a bad priest, or to whom—even if 
he know how to read—the Austrian catechism is the 
sole book allowed, he will perhaps tell you that his 
sole duties are to work hard for any remuneration he 
can obtain in order to maintain his family, to sub¬ 
mit without examination to the laws of the State, 
whatsoever they may be, and to do no wrong to 
others. Should you say to him: “ But you injure your 
brother-men by accepting a remuneration below the value 
of your labor , and you sin against God and your own soul 
by obeying laius which are unjust ,” he will answer you 
with the fixed gaze of one who understands you not. 

Interrogate the Italian workman, to whom more 


THE LAW. 


39 


fortunate circumstances and contact with men of 
greater intellectual enlightenment have made known 
a portion of the truth, he will tell you that his 
country is enslaved, that his brothers are unjustly 
condemned to pass their days in moral and material 
want, and that he feels it his duty to protest as far 
as he can against the injustice. 

Whence this great difference between the dictates 
of the conscience of two individuals at the same 
epoch in the same country ? Wherefore, among ten 
individuals, belonging substantially to the same 
religious belief—that which decrees the development 
and progress of the human race—do we find ten dif¬ 
ferent opinions as to the mode of reducing that 
belief to action—that is to say, as to their duties 2 
Evidently, the voice of individual conscience does 
not suffice at all times, without any other guide, to 
make known to us the law. Conscience alone may 
teach us that a law exists ; it cannot teach us the 
duties thence derived. Thus it is that martyrdom 
lias never been extinguished amongst mankind, how¬ 
ever great the predominance of selfishness ; but how 
many martyrs have sacrificed their existence for 
imaginary duties, or for errors patent to all of us at 
the present day ! 

Conscience, therefore, has need of a guide, of a 
torch to illumine the darkness by which it is sur¬ 
rounded, of a rule by which to direct and verify its 
instincts. 

This rule is the Intellect of Humanity. 

God has given intellect to each of you in order that 
you may educate it to know His Law. At the present 
day you are deprived by poverty, and the inveterate 


40 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


error of ages, of the possibility of full education, and, 
therefore, the obstacles to education are the first you 
have to overcome. But even were all these obstacles 
removed, the intellect of the individual man would 
still be insufficient to acquire a knowledge of the law 
of God, unless aided and supported by the intellect 
of Humanity. Your life is brief, your individual fac¬ 
ulties weak and uncertain; they need alike verification 
and support. Now God has placed beside you a Be¬ 
ing whose life is continuous, whose faculties are the 
results and sum of all the individual faculties that 
have existed for perhaps four hundred ages; a Being 
who, in the midst of the errors and crimes of individ¬ 
uals, yet ever advances in wisdom and morality; a 
Being in whose development and progress God has 
inscribed, and from epoch to epoch does still inscribe, 
a line of His law. 

This Being is Humanity. 

A thinker of the past century has described Human¬ 
ity as A man who lives and learns forever. Individuals 
die, but the amount of truth they have thought, and 
the sum of good they have done, dies not with them. 
The men who pass over their graves reap the benefit 
thereof, and Humanity garners it up. 

Each of us is born to-day in an atmosphere of ideas 
and beliefs which has been elaborated by all anterior 
Humanity, and each of us brings with him (even if 
unconsciously) an element, more or less important, of 
the life of Humanity to come. The education of 
Humanity is built up like those Eastern pyramids to 
which every passing traveller adds a stone. We pass 
along, the voyagers of the day, destined to complete 
our individual education elsewhere, but the education 


THE LAW. 


41 


of Humanity, which is seen by glimpses in each of us, 
is slowly, progressively, and continuously evolved 
through Humanity. 

Humanity is the Word, living in God. The Spirit 
of God fecundates it, and manifests itself through it 
in greater purity and activity from epoch to epoch, 
now through the instrumentality of an individual, 
now through that of a people. From labour to 
labour, from belief to belief, Humanity gradually 
acquires a clearer perception of its own life, of its 
own mission, of its God, and of His law. 

Humanity is the successive incarnation of God. The 
law of God is one, as God Himself is one ; but we 
only discover it article by article, line by line, accord¬ 
ing to the accumulated experience of the generations 
that have preceded us, and according to the exten¬ 
sion and increased intensity of association among 
races, peoples, and individuals. No man, no people, 
and no age may pretend to have discovered the whole 
of the Law. The Moral Law, Humanity’s Law of 
Life, can only be discovered, in its entirety, by all 
Humanity, united in holy association, when all the 
forces and all the faculties that constitute our human 
nature shall be developed and in action. But mean¬ 
while that portion of Humanity most advanced in 
education does, in its progress and development, 
reveal to us a portion of the Law we seek to know. 
Its history teaches us the design of God; its wants 
teach us our duties; because our first duty is to 
endeavor to aid the ascent of Humanity upon that 
stage of education and improvement towards which 
it has been prepared and matured by time and the 
Divinity. 


42 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


In order, therefore, to know the Law of God, you 
must interrogate not only your own conscience, but 
also the conscience and consent of Humanity. In 
order to know your own duties you must interrogate 
the present wants of Humanity. Morality is . pro¬ 
gressive, as is your education and that of the human 
race. The morality of Christianity was different from 
that of Paganism; the morality of our own age dif¬ 
fers from the morality of eighteen hundred years 
ago. 

Be assured that without education you cannot 
know your duties, and that whenever society pre¬ 
vents you from obtaining education, the responsibil¬ 
ity of your error rests upon society, not upon you; 
your responsibility begins on the day in which a path 
to instruction is opened to you, and-you neglect to 
pursue it; on the day in which the means are offered 
to you by which to transform the society which has 
too long condemned you to ignorance, and you neg¬ 
lect to seize them. You are not guilty because you 
are ignorant, but you are guilty when you resign 
yourselves to ignorance. You are guilty whenever— 
although your conscience whispers that God did not 
give you faculties without imposing upon you the 
duty of developing them—you allow the faculty of 
reflection to lie dormant within you; whenever—al¬ 
though you know that God would not have given you 
a love of truth without giving you the means by 
which to attain it—you yet despairingly renounce 
every effort to discover it, and accept as truth, with¬ 
out examination, the assertions either of the temporal 
powers or of the priest who has sold himself to 
them. 


THE LAW. 


43 


God, the Father and Educator of Humanity, reveals 
his Law to Humanity through time and space. Inter¬ 
rogate the tradition of Humanity—which is the Coun¬ 
cil of your brother-men—not in the restricted circle 
of an age or sect, but in all ages, and in the majority 
of mankind past and present. Whensoever the con¬ 
sent of Humanity corresponds with the teachings of your 
own conscience,you are certain of the Truth —certain, that 
is, of having read one line of the law of God. 

I believe in Humanity, sole interpreter of the Law of 
God on earth, and from the consent of Humanity, in 
harmony with my individual conscience, I deduce 
what 1 am now about to tell you with regard to your 
duties. 





CHAPTER IV. 


DUTIES TOWARDS HUMANITY. 

Your first duties—first, not as to time, but as to 
importance, because,, unless you understand these, 
you can only imperfectly fulfill the rest—your first 
duties are towards Humanity. You have duties as 
citizens, as sons, as husbands, and as fathers; duties 
sacred and inviolable, and of which I shall shortly 
speak to you in detail; but that which constitutes the 
sacredness and inviolability of these duties is the 
mission, the duty, springing from your Human nature. 

You are fathers in order that you may educate men 
in the worship and fulfillment of the Law of God. 
You are citizens, you have a country, in order that in 
a given and limited sphere of action, the concourse 
and assistance of a certain number of men, already 
related to you by language, tendencies, and customs, 
may enable you to labour more effectually for the 
good of all me?i present and to come; a task in which 
your solitary effort would be lost, falling powerless 
and unheeded amid the immense multitude of your 
fellow-beings. 

They who pretend to teach you morality while 
limiting your duties to those you owe to your family 
and to your country, do but teach you a more or less 
enlarged selfishness, tending to the injury of others 
and to yourself. The Family and the Fatherland are 


DUTIES TOWARDS HUMANITY. 


45 


like two circles, drawn within a larger circle which 
contains both; they are two steps of the ladder you 
have to climb; without them your ascent is impossi¬ 
ble, but upon them it is forbidden to rest. 

You are men: that is to say, creatures capable of 
rational, social, and intellectual progress, solely through 
the medium of association : a progress to which none 
may assign a limit. 

This is all we as yet know with regard to the law 
of the life of Humanity. These characteristics con¬ 
stitute human nature; these characteristics distinguish 
you from the different creatures that surround you, 
and are given to each of you as the germ you are 
bound to fructify. Your whole life should tend to 
the organized development and exercise of these 
faculties of your nature. Whensoever you suppress, 
or allow to be suppressed, one of these faculties, 
whether completely or partially, you descend from 
the rank of men to that of the inferior animals, and 
violate your law of life, the Law of God. You de¬ 
scend to the level of the brute whenever you sup¬ 
press, or allow to be suppressed, any of the faculties 
that constitute human nature either in yourselves or 
others. God wills that you shall fulfill His law not as 
individuals alone. Had He intended this, He would 
have created you solitary. He wills that the Law 
be fulfilled over the whole earth, among all the 
creatures He created after His own image. He wills 
that the Divine Idea of perfectibility and love which 
He has incarnated in the world, shall be revealed in 
ever-increasing brightness, and worshipped through 
its gradual realization by His creatures. 

In your terrestrial existence, limited both in educa- 


46 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


tion and capacity, the realization of this Divine Idea 
can only be most imperfect and momentary. Hu¬ 
manity only—continuous in existence through the 
passing generations, continuous in intellect through 
the contributions of all its members—is capable of 
gradually evolving, applying, and glorifying the 
Divine Idea. 

Life, therefore, was given to you by God in order 
that you might employ that life for the benefit of 
Humanity ; that you might direct your individual 
faculties to aid the development of the faculties of 
your brother-men, and contribute by your labour 
another element to the collective work of Progress, 
and the discovery of the truth, which the generations 
are destined slowly but unceasingly to promote. 
Your duty is to educate yourselves, and to educate 
others ; to strive to perfect yourselves and to perfect 
others. 

It is true that God lives within you, but God lives 
in all the men by whom the earth is peopled. 
God is in the life of all the generations that have 
been, are, and are to be. Past generations have pro¬ 
gressively improved, and coming generations will 
continue to improve, the conception which Humanity 
forms of Him, of His Law, and of our duties. You 
are bound to adore Him and to glorify Him whereso¬ 
ever He manifests His presence. The Universe is His 
Temple, and the sin of every unresisted or unex¬ 
piated profanation of the Temple weighs on the head 
of each and all of the Believers. 

It is of no avail to assert your own purity, even 
were true purity possible in isolation. Whensoever 
you see corruption by your side, and do not strive 


DUTIES TOWARDS HUMANITY. 


47 


against it, you betray your duty. It is of no avail 
that you worship truth ; if you see your brother-men 
ruled by error in some portion of the earth—our 
common mother—and you do not both desire and 
endeavour, so far as lies in your power, to overcome 
that error, you betray your duty. 

The image of God is disfigured in the immortal 
souls of your fellow-men. God wills to be adored 
through His Law, and His Law is violated and mis¬ 
interpreted around you. Human nature is falsified 
in the millions of men to whom, even as to you, God 
has confided the associate fulfillment of His design. 
And do you dare to call yourselves believers while you 
remain inert ? 

A People—Greek, Pole, Italian, Circassian—raises 
the flag of country and independence, and combats, 
conquers, or dies to defend it. What is it that causes 
your hearts to beat at the news of those battles, that 
makes them swell with joy at their victories, and sink 
with sorrow at their defeats? A man—it may be a 
foreigner in some remote corner of the world—arises, 
and, amidst the universal silence, gives utterance to 
certain ideas which he believes to be true; maintains 
them through persecution, and in chains, or dies 
upon the scaffold, and denies them not. Wherefore 
do you honor that man and call him saint and martyr? 
Why do you respect, and teach your children to re¬ 
spect, his memory? Why do you read so eagerly the 
prodigies of patriotism registered in Grecian history, 
and relate them to your children with a sense of 
pride, as if they belonged to the history of your an¬ 
cestors ? 

These deeds of Greece are two thousand years old, 


48 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


and belong to an epoch of civilization which is not, 
and never can be, yours. These men whom you still 
call martyrs, perhaps died for a faith which is not 
yours, and certainly their death cut short their every 
hope of individual progress on earth. That people 
whom you admire, in its victories or in its fall, is a 
foreign people, almost unknown to you and speaking 
a strange tongue. Their way of life has no influence 
on yours. What matters it, then, to ' you whether 
they be ruled by Pope or Sultan, by the King of 
Bavaria, the Czar of Russia, or a free government 
sprung from the consent of the nation? 

It is that there is in your heart a voice that cries 
unto you: “ Those men of two thousand years ago, 
those populations now fighting afar off, that martyr for 
an idea for which you would not die, are your brothers; 
brothers not only in community of origin and of 
nature, but in community of labor and of aim. 
Those Greeks passed away, but their deeds remained; 
and were it not for them, you would not have reached 
your present degree of moral and intellectual develop¬ 
ment. Those populations consecrate with their blood 
an idea of national liberty for which you too would 
combat. That martyr proclaimed by his death that 
man is bound to sacrifice all things, and, if need be, 
life itself, for that which he believes to be truth. 
What matters it that he, and all of those who thus 
seal their faith with their blood, cut short their indi¬ 
vidual progress on earth? God will provide for them 
elsewhere. But it is of import that the coming 
generation, taught by your struggle and your sacri¬ 
fice, may arise stronger and nobler than you have 
been, in fuller comprehension of the Law, in greater 


DUTIES TOWARDS HUMANITY. 


49 


adoration of the truth. It is of import that human 
nature, fortified by these examples, may improve, de¬ 
velop, and realize still further the Design of God on 
earth, and wheresoever human nature shall improve 
or develop, wheresoever a new truth be discovered, 
wheresoever a step be taken on the path of educa¬ 
tion, progress, and morality, that step taken, and that 
truth discovered, will sooner or later benefit all Hu¬ 
manity. 

“ You are all soldiers in one army, an army which 
is advancing by different paths, and divided into 
different corps, to the conquest of one sole aim. As 
yet you only look to your immediate leaders; diver¬ 
sity of uniform and of watchword, the distances 
which separate the different bodies of troops, and the 
mountains that conceal them one from another, fre¬ 
quently cause you to forget this great truth, and con¬ 
centrate your thoughts exclusively on your own im¬ 
mediate goal. But there is One above you who sees 
the whole and directs all your movements. God 
alone has the plan of the battle, and He at length will 
unite you in a single camp, beneath a single ban¬ 
ner.” 

How great is the distance between this faith, which 
thrills within our souls, and which will be the basis 
of the morality of the coming epoch, and the faith 
that was the basis of the morality of the generations 
of what we term antiquity !' And how intimate is the 
connection between the idea we form of the Divine 
Government and that we form of our own duties ! 

The first men felt God, but without comprehend¬ 
ing or even seeking to comprehend Him or His law. 
They felt Him in His power, not in His love. They 
4 


5 ° 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 1 


conceived a confused idea of some sort of relation 
between Him and their own individuality, but noth¬ 
ing beyond this. Able to withdraw themselves but 
little from the sphere of visible objects, they sought 
to incarnate Him in one of these: in the tree they 
had seen struck by the thunderbolt, the rock beside 
which they had raised their tent, the animal which 
first presented itself before them. This was the wor¬ 
ship which, in the history of Religions, is termed 
Fetichism. 

In those days men comprehended nothing beyond 
the Family, the reproduction in a certain form of 
their own individuality; all beyond the family circle 
were strangers, or more often enemies; to aid them¬ 
selves and their families was to them the sole founda¬ 
tion of morality. 

In later days the idea of God was enlarged. From 
visible objects men timidly raised their thoughts to 
abstractions; they learned to generalize. God was 
no longer regarded as the Protector of the family only, 
but of the association of many families, of the cities, 
of the peoples. Thus to fetichism succeeded poly¬ 
theism —the worship of many gods. The sphere of 
action of morality was also enlarged. Men recog¬ 
nized the existence of more extended duties than 
those due to the family alone; they strove for the 
advancement of the people , of the nation. Yet, never¬ 
theless, Humanity was still ignored. Each nation 
stigmatized foreigners as barbarians, regarded them 
as such, and endeavoured to conquer or oppress them 
by force or fraud. Each nation also contained 
foreigners or barbarians within its own circle; mill¬ 
ions of men not admitted to join in the religious 


DUTIES TOWARDS HUMANITY. 


51 


rites of the citizens, and believed to be of an inferior 
nature: slaves among free men. The idea of the 
Unity of the human race could only be conceived as 
a consequence of the Unity of God. And the Unity 
of God, though forefelt by a few rare thinkers of 
antiquity, and openly declared by Moses (but with 
the fatal defect of believing one sole people His 
elect) was not a recognized creed until towards the 
end of the Roman Empire, and through the teachings 
of Christianity. 

Foremost and grandest amid the teachings of 
Christ, were these two inseparable truths— There is 
but one God; All men are the Sons of God; and the 
promulgation of these two truths changed the face of 
the world, and enlarged the moral circle to the con¬ 
fines of the inhabited globe. To the duties of men 
towards the Family and Country were added duties 
towards Humanity. Man then learned that whereso¬ 
ever there existed a human being, there existed a 
brother; a brother with a soul as immortal as his own, 
destined like himself to ascend towards the Creator, 
and on whom he was bound to bestow love, a knowl¬ 
edge of the faith, and help and counsel when needed. 

Then did the Apostles utter words of sublime im¬ 
port, in prevision of those great truths of which the 
germ was contained in Christianity; truths which 
have been misunderstood or betrayed by their suc¬ 
cessors. “ For as we have many members i?i one body , 
and all members have not the same office; so we , be mg 
many , are one body in Christ , and every one members one 
of another .” (St. Paul, Rom., xii. 4. 5.) 

“ And other sheep I have , which are not of this fold; 
them «lso I must brings and they shall hear my voice; and 


52 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


there shall be one fold and one shepherd (St. John, 
x. 16.) 

And at the present day, after eighteen hundred 
years of labour, study, and experience, we have yet 
to develop these germs, we have yet to apply these , 
truths, not only to each individual, but to all that 
complex sum of human forces and faculties, present 
and future, which is named Humanity. We have yet 
to teach mankind not only that Humanity is one Sole 
Being, and must be governed by one sole law, but 
that the first article of the law is Progress ;—progress 
here, on this earth, where we are bound to realize, as 
far as in us lies, the design of God, and educate our¬ 
selves for higher destinies. 

We have still to teach mankind that as Humanity 
is one sole body, all we, being members of that body, 
are bound to labour for its development, and to seek 
to render its life more harmonious, vigourous, and 
active. We have still to be convinced that we can 
only elevate ourselves towards God through the souls 
of our fellow-men, and that it is our duty to improve 
and purify them, even though they seek not such im¬ 
provement and purification. And we have still—since 
only by entire Humanity can the design of God be fully 
accomplished here below—we have still to substitute 
a work of association tending to elevate the mass, for 
the exercise of charity towards individuals, and to 
organize both the family and the country to that - 
aim. 

Other and vaster duties will be revealed to us in 
the future, in proportion as we acquire a clearer and 
less imperfect conception of our law of life. 

Thus does God the Father, by means of a slow, but 


DUTIES TOWARDS HUMANITY. 


53 


uninterrupted, religious education, direct the advance 
of Humanity, and our individual improvement corre¬ 
sponds with that advance. 

Our individual improvement corresponds with that 
advance; nor, without the advance and improvement 
of the whole, may you hope for any lasting improve¬ 
ment in your moral and material individual condi¬ 
tion. Strictly speaking, you cannot, even if you 
would, separate your life from that of Humanity. 
You live in it, by it, and for it. Your souls—with 
the exception of certain men of extraordinary 
power—cannot rid themselves of the influence of the 
elements amongst which they move; even as your 
bodies, however robust, cannot rid themselves of the 
effects of the corrupt air by which they are sur¬ 
rounded. How many are there among you, who, 
knowing that they thereby expose them to persecu¬ 
tion, yet strive to educate your children to absolute 
truthfulness, in a society where ignorance or preju¬ 
dice enforces silence or concealment of two-thirds of 
their opinions? How many of you strive to teach 
them to despise wealth in a society wherein gold is 
the sole power that obtains respect, influence, and 
honor ? What mother is there among you, who, 
although belonging to that faith which adores in 
Christ the voluntary martyr for Humanity, yet would 
not throw her arms round her son’s neck, and seek to 
wean him from all perilous endeavour to benefit his 
brother-men ? 

And even should you have strength to teach the 
better lesson, would not all society, with its thousand 
tongues and thousands of evil examples, destroy the 
effect of your words ? Can you purify and exalt your 


54 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


own souls in an atmosphere of morai degradation 
and contagion ? or—to descend to your material con¬ 
dition—think you it can be duly ameliorated, unless 
by the amelioration of all ? 

Here in England, where I now write, millions of 
pounds sterling are annually bestowed in private 
charity for the relief of individual misery; yet that 
misery annually increases, and private charity is 
proved impotent to meet the evil, and the necessity 
of collective organic remedies is ever more univers¬ 
ally acknowledged. And in countries despotically 
governed, where taxes and restrictions are imposed 
at the sole caprice of the ruler, the cost of whose 
armies, spies, agents, and pensioners is continually 
increasing as the necessity of providing for the safety 
of the despotism increases, think you that a con¬ 
stant activity and development of industry and manu¬ 
factures is possible? Think you that it will suffice to 
improve the government and social condition of your 
own country? No; it will not suffice. No nation 
lives exclusively on its own produce at the present 
day. You live by exchanges, by importation and ex¬ 
portation. A foreign nation impoverished, and in 
which the number of consumers is diminished, is one 
market the less for you. A foreign commerce ruined 
in consequence of evil administration, produces mis¬ 
chief and crises in your own. Failures in America 
and elsewhere, entail failures in England. Credit 
now-a-days is no longer a national but a European 
institution. 

Moreover, all other governments will be hostile to 
your national improvements, for there is an alliance 
among the princes, who were among the first to un- 


DUTIES TOWARI S HUMANITY. 


55 


derstand that the socia. question has become a gene¬ 
ral question at the present day. 

The only lasting hope for you is in the general 
amelioration, improvement, and fraternity of all the 
peoples of Europe, and, through Europe, of Humanity. 

Therefore, my brothers, in the name of your duty, 
and for the sake of your interest, never forget that 
your first duties—duties, without fulfilling which you 
cannot rightly fulfill those towards your country and 
family—are those towards Humanity. 

Let your words and your actions be for all men, as 
God is for all men in His Law and Love. In whatso¬ 
ever land you live, wheresoever there arises a man 
to combat for the right, the just, and the true, that 
man is your brother. Wheresoever a man is tortured 
through error, injustice, or tyranny, that man is your 
brother. Free men or slaves, you are all brothers. 
You are one in origin, one in the Divine Law that gov¬ 
erns you, and one in the goal you are destined to at¬ 
tain. Your faith must be one, your actions one, and 
one the banner under which you combat. Say not, 
The language we speak is different. Acts, tears, and 
martyrdom are a language common to all men, and 
which all understand. Say not, Humanity is toe vast, 
and we are too weak. God does not judge the power, 
but the intention. Love Humanity. Ask yourselves 
as to every act you commit within the circle of family 
or country, “If what I now do were done by and for all 
men , would it be beneficial or ifijurious to Humanity ? ” 
And if your conscience tells you it would be injuri¬ 
ous, desist; desist, even though it seem that an im¬ 
mediate advantage to your country or family would 
be the result. 


56 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


Be you the Apostles of this faith: apostles of the 
fraternity of nations, and of that unity of the human 
race, which, though it be admitted in principle, is de¬ 
nied in practice at the present day. Be such, where¬ 
soever, and howsoever you are able. Neither God 
nor man can require more of you than this. But I 
tell you that by becoming such, and even—should 
more be impossible—by becoming such to yourselves 
alone, you will yet serve Humanity. God measures 
the stages of education, He permits the human race 
to ascend, by the number and the purity of the be¬ 
lievers. When the pure among you are many, God, 
who numbers you, will disclose to you the way to 
action. 


CHAPTER V. 


DUTIES TOWARDS YOUR COUNTRY. 

1858. 

Your first duties—first as regards importance—■ 
are, as I have already told you, towards Humanity. 
You are i?ien before you are either citizens or fathers. 
If you do not embrace the whole human family in 
your affection; if you do not bear witness to your 
belief in the Unity of that family, consequent upon 
the Unity of God, and in that fraternity among the 
peoples which is destined to reduce that Unity to 
action; if, wheresoever a fellow-creature suffers, or 
the dignity of human nature is violated by falsehood 
or tyranny—you are not ready, if able, to aid the 
unhappy, and do not feel called upon to combat, 
if able, for the redemption of the betrayed and 
oppressed—you violate your law of life, you compre¬ 
hend not that Religion which will be the guide and 
blessing of the future. 

But what can each of you, singly, do for the moral 
improvement and progress of Humanity? You can 
from time to time give sterile utterance to your 
belief; you may, on some rare occasions, perform 
some act of charity towards a brother-man not belong¬ 
ing to your own land—no more. But charity is not 
the watchword of the Faith of the Future. The 
watchword of the faith of the future is Association 
and fraternal cooperation towards a common aim; 


58 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


and this is far superior to all charity, as the edifice 
which all of you should unite to raise would be supe¬ 
rior to the humble hut each one of you might build 
alone, or with the mere assistance of lending and 
borrowing stone, mortar, and tools. 

But, you tell me, you cannot attempt united action, 
distinct and divided as you are in language, customs, 
tendencies, and capacity. The individual is too insig¬ 
nificant, and Humanity too vast. The mariner of 
Brittany prays to God as he puts to sea; Help vie, 
viy God! viy boat is so small and Thy ocean so wide ! ” 
And this prayer is the true expression of the con¬ 
dition of each one of you, until you find the means 
of infinitely multiplying your forces and powers of 
action. 

This means was provided for you by God when He 
gave you a country; when, even as a wise overseer of 
labour distributes the various branches of employment 
according to the different capacities of the workmen, 
he divided Humanity into distinct groups or nuclei 
upon the face of the earth, thus creating the germ of 
nationalities. Evil governments have disfigured the 
Divine design. Nevertheless you may still trace it, 
distinctly marked out—at least as far as Europe is 
concerned—by the course of the great rivers, the di¬ 
rection of the higher mountains, and other geograph¬ 
ical conditions. They have disfigured it by their 
conquests, their greed, and their jealousy even of the 
righteous power of others; disfigured it so far that, if 
we except England and France, there is not perhaps a 
single country whose present boundaries correspond 
to that design. 

These governments did not, and do not, recognize 


DUTIES TOWARDS YOUR COUNTRY. 


59 


any country save their own families or dynasty, the 
egoism of caste. But the Divine design will infalli¬ 
bly be realized; natural divisions and the spontane¬ 
ous, innate tendencies of the peoples will take the 
place of the arbitrary divisions, sanctioned by evil 
governments. The map of Europe will be redrawn. 
The countries of the peoples, defined by the vote of 
free men, will arise upon the ruins of the coun¬ 
tries of kings and privileged castes, and between 
these countries harmony and fraternity will exist. 
And the common work of Humanity, of general ameli¬ 
oration, and the gradual.discovery and application of 
its Law of life, being distributed according to local 
and general capacities, will be wrought out in peace¬ 
ful and progressive development and advance. Then 
may each one of you, fortified by the power and 
affection of many millions, all speaking the same 
language, gifted with the same tendencies, and' edu¬ 
cated by the same historical tradition, hope even by 
your own single efforts to be able to benefit all 
Humanity. 

O, my brothers, love your Country ! Our country 
is our Home, a house God lias given us, placing 
therein a numerous family that loves us, and whom 
we love; a family with whom we sympathize more 
readily and whom we understand more quickly than 
we do others; and which, from its being centred 
round a given spot, and from the homogeneous 
nature of its elements, is adapted to a special branch 
of activity. Our Country is our common workshop, 
whence the products of our activity are sent forth for 
the benefit of the whole world; wherein the tools 
and implements of labour we can most usefully 


6o 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


employ are gathered together; nor may we reject 
them without disobeying the plan of the Almighty, 
and diminishing our own strength. 

In labouring for our own country on the right prin¬ 
ciple, we labour for Humanity. Our country is the 
fulcrum of the lever we have to wield for the com¬ 
mon good. If we abandon the fulcrum, we run the 
risk of rendering ourselves useless not only to 
Humanity but to our country itself. Before men can 
associate with the nations of which Humanity is 
composed, they must have a national existence. 
There is no true association except among equals. It 
is only through our country that we can have a 
recognized collective existence. 

Humanity is a vast army advancing to the con¬ 
quest of lands unknown, against enemies both pow¬ 
erful and astute. The peoples are the different corps, 
the divisions of that army. Each of them has its 
post assigned to it, and its special operation to exe¬ 
cute; and the common victory depends upon the ex¬ 
actitude with which those distinct operations are ful¬ 
filled. Disturb not the order of battle. Forsake not 
the banner given to you by God. Wheresoever you 
may be, in the centre of whatsoever people circum¬ 
stances may have placed you, be ever ready to com¬ 
bat for the liberty of that people, should it be neces¬ 
sary, but combat in such wise that the blood you shed 
may reflect glory, not on yourself alone, but on your 
country. Say not 7, but We. Let each man among you 
strive to incarnate his country in himself. Let each man 
among you regard himself as a guarantor, responsible 
for his fellow-countrymen, and learn so to govern his 
actions as to cause his country to be loved and re- 



DUTIES TOWARDS YOUR COUNTRY. 6l 

spected through him. Your country is the sign of 
the Mission God has given you to fulfill towards 
Humanity. The faculties and forces of all her sons 
should be associated in the accomplishment of that 
mission. The true country is a community of free men 
and equals, bound together in fraternal concord to 
labour towards a common aim. You are bound to 
make it and to maintain it such. The country is not 
an aggregation , but an association. There is, therefore, 
no true country without a uniform right. There is 
no true country where the uniformity of that right is 
violated by the existence of caste privilege and in¬ 
equality. Where the activity of a portion of the 
powers and faculties of the individual is either can¬ 
celled or dormant; where there is not a common 
Principle, recognized, accepted, and developed by all, 
there is no true Nation, no People; but only a mul¬ 
titude, a fortuitous agglomeration of men whom cir¬ 
cumstances have called together and whom cir¬ 
cumstances may again divide. In the name of the 
love you bear your country, you must peacefully but 
untiringly combat the existence of privilege and in¬ 
equality in the land that gave you life. 

There is but one sole legitimate privilege, the privi¬ 
lege of Genius when it reveals itself united with vir¬ 
tue. But this is a privilege given by God, and when 
you acknowledge it, and follow its inspiration, you do 
so freely, exercising your own reason and your own 
choice. Every privilege which demands submission 
from you in virtue of power, inheritance, or any other 
right than the Right common to all, is a usurpation 
and a tyranny which you are bound to resist and 
destroy. 


6 2 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


Be your country your Temple: God at the sum¬ 
mit; a people of equals at the base. 

Accept no other formula, no other moral law, if you 
would not dishonour alike your country and your¬ 
selves. Let all secondary laws be but the gradual 
regulation of your existence by the progressive appli¬ 
cation of this Supreme law. And in order that they 
may be such, it is necessary that all of you should 
aid in framing them. Laws framed only by a single 
fraction of the citizens, can never, in the very nature 
of things, be other than the mere expression of 
the thoughts, aspirations, and desires of that frac¬ 
tion; the representation, not of the country, but of 
a third or fourth part, of a class or zone of the 
country. 

The laws should be the expression of the universal 
aspiration, and promote the universal good. The)/- 
should be a pulsation of the heart of the nation. The 
entire nation should, either directly or indirectly, 
legislate. 

By yielding up this mission into the hands of a 
a few, you substitute the selfishness of one class for 
the Country, which is the union of all classes. 

Country is not only a mere zone of territory. The 
true Country is the Idea to which it gives birth; it is 
the Thought of love, the sense of communion which 
unites in one all the sons of that territory. 

So long as a single one amongst your brothers has 
no vote to represent him in the development of the 
national life, so long as there is one left to vegetate 
in ignorance where others are educated, so long as a 
single man, able and willing to work, languishes in 
poverty through want of work to do, you have no 


DUTIES TOWARDS YOUR COUNTRY. 63 

country in the sense in which Country ought to exist 
—the country of all and for all. 

Education, labour, and the franchise, are the three 
main pillars of the Nation; rest not until you have 
built them thoroughly up with your own labour and 
exertions. 

Be it yours to evolve the life of your country in 
loveliness and strength; free from all servile fears or 
sceptical doubts; maintaining as its basis the People; 
as its guide the principles of its Religious Faith, 
logically and energetically applied; its strength, the 
united strength of all; its aim, the fulfillment of the 
mission given to it by God. 

And so long as you are ready to die for Humanity, 
the life of your country will be immortal. 


CHAPTER VI. 


DUTIES TOWARDS THE FAMILY. 

The Family is the Heart’s Fatherland. There is 
in the Family an Angel, possessed of a mysterious 
influence of grace, sweetness, love; an Angel who 
renders our duties less arid and our sorrows less 
titter. The only pure and unalloyed happiness, the 
only joys untainted by grief granted to man on this 
earth are—thanks be given to this Angel !—the happi¬ 
ness and joys of the family. He who, from some fatality 
of position, has been unable to live the calm life of 
the Family, sheltered beneath this Angel’s wing, has 
a shadow of sadness cast over his soul, and a void in 
his heart which naught can fill, as I, who write these 
pages for you, know. 

Bless the God who created this Angel, O you who 
share the joys and consolations of the Family ! Hold 
them not in light esteem, because you fancy you 
might find more ardent pleasures and more facile 
consolations elsewhere. There is in the family an 
element rarely found elsewhere—the element of dura¬ 
bility. Family affections wind themselves round 
your heart slowly and all unobserved; but tenacious 
and enduring as the ivy round the tree, they cling to 
you hour by hour, mingling with and becoming 
a portion of your very existence. Very often you 


DUTIES TOWARDS THE FAMILY. 


65 


are unconscious of them, because they are a part 
of yourselves; but when once you lose them, you 
feel as if an intimate and necessary portion of 
your life were gone. You wander restless and 
unhappy; it may be that you again succeed iu find¬ 
ing some brief delights and consolations, but never 
the supreme consjlation of calm; the calm of the 
waters of the lake, the calm of trusting sleep, a re¬ 
pose like that of the child on its mother’s breast. 

This Angel of the family is woman. Whether as 
mother, wife, or sister, woman is the caress of exist¬ 
ence, the soft sweetness of affection diffused over its 
fatigues, a reflection in the individual of that loving 
Providence which watches over Humanity. She has 
in her a treasure of gentle consolation sufficient to 
soothe every sorrow. Moreover, she is for each of 
us the Initiatrix of the future. The child learns its 
first lesson of love from its mother’s kiss. In the 
first sacred kiss of the beloved one, man learns the 
lesson of hope and faith in life, and hope and faith 
create that yearning after progress, and that power 
to achieve it step by step—that f uture, in short—whose 
living symbol is the infant, our link with the genera¬ 
tions to come. It is through woman that the 
family—with its Divine mystery of reproduction— 
points to Eternity. 

Hold, then, the family sacred,'my brothers ! Look 
upon it as one of th q indestructible conditions of life, 
and reject every attempt made to undermine it, 
either by men imbued with a false and brutish phil¬ 
osophy, or by shallow thinkers, who, irritated at see¬ 
ing it too often made the nursery of selfishness and the 
spirit of caste, imagine, like the savage, that the sole 
5 


66 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


remedy for this evil growth, is the destruction of the 
tree itself. 

The conception of the family is not human, but 
Divine, and no human power can extinguish it. Like 
the Fatherland—even more than the Fatherland— 
the family is an element of existence. 

I have said, even more than the Fatherland. Dis¬ 
tinctions of country—sacred now—may possibly dis¬ 
appear whenever man shall bear the moral law of 
Humanity inscribed upon his own 'heart, but the 
family will endure while man himself endures. It is 
the cradle of Humanity. Like every other element 
of human life, it is, of course, susceptible of progress, 
and from epoch to epoch its tendencies and aspira¬ 
tions are improved, but it can never be cancelled. 
Your mission is evermore to sanctify the family, and 
to link it ever more closely with the country. That 
which the country is to Humanity, the family must 
be to the country. Even as the scope and object of 
our love of country is, as I have told you, to educate 
you as men, so the scope and object of the family is 
to educate you as citizens. The family and the 
country are the two extreme points of one and the 
same line. And wheresoever this is not the case the 
family degenerates into selfishness, a selfishness the 
more odious and brutal, inasmuch as it prostitutes 
and perverts from their true aim the most sacred 
things that be—our affections. 

Love and respect woman. See in her not merely a 
comfort, but a force, an inspiration, the redoubling of 
your intellectual and moral faculties. 

Cancel from your minds every idea of superiority 
over woman. You have none whatsoever. 


DUTIES TOWARDS THE FAMILY. 67 

Long prejudice, an inferior education, and a peren¬ 
nial legal inequality and injustice, have created that 
apparent intellectual inferiority which has been con¬ 
verted into an argument for continued oppression. 

But does not the history of every oppression teach 
us how the oppressor ever seeks his justification and 
support by appealing to a fact of his own creation ? 
The feudal castes that withheld education from the 
sons of the people, excluded them, on the grounds of 
that very want of education, from the rights of the citi¬ 
zen, from the sanctuary wherein laws are framed, and 
from that right to vote which is the initiation of their 
social mission. The slaveholders of America declare 
the black race radically inferior and incapable of 
education, and yet persecute those who seek to in¬ 
struct them. For half a century the supporters of 
the reigning families in Italy have declared the 
Italians unfit for freedom, and meanwhile, by their 
laws, and by the brute force of hireling armies, they 
close every path through which we might overcome 
the obstacles to our improvement, where such really 
exist, as if tyranny could ever be a means of educat¬ 
ing men for liberty. 

Now, we men have ever been, and still are, guilty 
of a similar crime towards woman. Avoid even the 
shadow or semblance of this crime; there is none 
heavier in the sight of God, for it divides the human 
family into two classes, and imposes or accepts the 
subjugation of one class to the other. 

In the sight of God the Father there is neither man 
or woman. There is only the human being , that being 
in whom, whether the form be of male or female, 
those characteristics which distinguish Humanity 


68 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


from the brute creation are united, namely: the 
social tendency, and the capacity of education and 
progress. 

Wheresoever these characteristics exist, the human 
nature is revealed, and thence perfect equality both 
of rights and of duties. 

Like two distinct branches springing from the 
same trunk, man and woman are varieties springing 
from the common basis—Humanity. There is no in¬ 
equality between them, but, even as is often the case 
among men, diversity of tendency and of special 
vocation. Are two notes of the same musical chord 
unequal or of different nature? Man and woman are 
the two notes without which the Human chord is im¬ 
possible. 

Suppose two peoples, one of which is called by 
circumstances and by special tendencies to the mis¬ 
sion of diffusing the idea of human association by 
means of colonization, and the other to teach that 
idea by the production of universally admired liter¬ 
ature and art; are their general rights and duties 
therefore different? Both of these people are, con¬ 
sciously or unconsciously, Apostles of the same Divine 
Idea, equals and brothers in that idea. 

Man and Woman, even as these two peoples, fulfill 
different functions in Humanity, but these functions 
are equally sacred, equally manifestations of that 
Thought of God which He has made the soul of the 
universe. 

Consider woman, therefore, as the partner and 
companion, not merely of your joys and sorrows, but 
of your thoughts, your aspirations, your studies and 
your endeavours after social amelioration. Consider 


DUTIES TOWARDS THE FAMILY. 69 

her your equal in your civil and political life. Be ye 
the two human wings that lift the soul towards the 
Ideal we are destined to attain. The Mosaic Bible 
has declared: God created man, and woman from man; 
but your Bible, the Bible of the Future, will proclaim 
that God created Humanity , made manifest in the woman 
and the man. 

Love the children given to you by God, but love 
them with a true, deep, and earnest affection; not 
with the enervated, blind, unreasonable love, which 
is but selfishness in you, and ruin to them. In 
the name of all that is most sacred, never forget that 
through them you have in charge the future genera¬ 
tions; that towards them, as souls confided to your 
keeping, towards Humanity, and before God, you are 
under the heaviest responsibility known to mankind. 
You are bound to instruct your children, not merely 
in the joys and desires of life, but in life itself; in its 
duties, and in its moral law of government. Few 
mothers, few fathers, in this irreligious age—and 
especially in the wealthier classes—understand the 
true gravity of their educational mission. Few 
mothers, few fathers, remember that the numerous 
victims, the incessant struggles, and the life-long 
martyrdoms of our day, are in a great measure the 
fruit of the selfishness instilled thirty years back by 
the weak mothers and heedless fathers who allowed 
their children to accustom themselves to regard life, 
not as a mission and a duty, but as a search after 
happiness and a study of their own well-being. For 
you, the sons of labour, these dangers are less; the 
greater number of you know only too well what it is 
to live the life of privation. But, compelled by your 


70 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


inferior social position to constant toil, you are also 
less able to bestow upon your children a fitting edu¬ 
cation. Nevertheless, even you can in part fulfill 
your arduous mission, both by word and by example. 

You can do it by example. 

“ Your children will resemble you, and become cor¬ 
rupt or virtuous in proportion as you are yourself 
corrupt or virtuous. How shall they become honest, 
charitable, and humane, if you are without charity for 
your brothers ? How shall they restrain their grosser 
appetites, if they see you given up to intemperance ? 
How shall they preserve their native innocence, if you 
shrink not from offending their modesty by indecent 
act or obscene word ? You are the living model by 
which their pliant nature is fashioned. It depends, 
then, upon you, whether your children be men or 
brutes.” (Lamennais, Words of a Believer)) 

And you may educate your children by your words. 

Speak to them of your country; of what she was, 
and is, and ought to be. At evening when, beneath 
the smile of their mother and amid the innocent 
prattle of your children seated on your knee, you for¬ 
get the day’s fatigue, repeat to them the names and 
deeds of the good men who have loved their country 
and the people, and who have striven, amid sorrows, 
calumny, and persecution, to elevate their destiny. 
Instil into their young hearts the strength to resist 
injustice and oppression. Let them learn from your 
lips, and the calm approval of their mother, how 
lovely is the path of virtue; how noble it is to become 
apostles of the truth, how holy to sacrifice themselves, 
if need be, for their fellows. Infuse into their tender 
minds, not merely the energy of resistance to every 


DUTIES TOWARDS THE FAMILY. 71 

false or unjust authority, but due reverence for the 
sole, legitimate, and true authority—that of virtue 
crowned by genius. See that they grow up enemies 
alike to tyranny and anarchy, and in a Religion of a 
conscience inspired, but not enchained, by tradition. 

The Nation is bound to aid you in this work. And 
you have a right to exact this aid in your children’s 
name. There is no true Nation without a National 
Education. 

Love and reverence your Parents. Let not the 
family that issues from you make you unmindful of 
that from which you sprang. Too often do the new 
ties weaken the old, whereas they should be but 
another link in the chain of love that should unite 
the three generations of the family in one. Surround 
the gray hairs of your mother and father with tender 
affection and respectful care even to their last day. 
Strew their path to the tomb with flowers. Let your 
constant love shed a perfume of faith and immor¬ 
tality over their weary souls. And be the affection 
you bestow on your own parents a pledge of that you 
shall receive from )rour children. 

Parents, sisters, brothers, wives, and children, be 
they all to you as branches springing from the same 
stem. Sanctify the family by unity of love, and make 
of it the Temple wherein you unite to bear sacrifice 
to your country. 

I know not whether you will be happy if you act 
thus; but I do know that even in the midst of advers¬ 
ity you will find that serene peace of the heart, that 
repose of the tranquil conscience, which will give 
you strength in every trial, andxheer your souls with 
a glimpse of heavenly azure even in the darkest storm. 


CHAPTER VII. 


DUTIES TOWARDS YOURSELVES. 

I have already said to you: You have life, therefore 
you have a Law of life. To develop yourselves, to act 
and live according to your Lazv of life, is your first, or 
rather your sole, duty. 

I have told you that God has given you two means 
of arriving at a knowledge of your Law of life. He 
has given you your own conscience, and the con¬ 
science of Humanity, the common consent of your 
fellow-men. I have told you that whenever, on inter¬ 
rogating your own conscience, you find its voice in 
harmony with the mighty voice of the human race 
transmitted to you by history, you may be certain of 
holding an immutable and eternal truth. 

At present it is difficult for you fitly to interrogate 
this mighty voice of Humanity transmitted by his¬ 
tory. You are in want of really good popular books 
on this subject, or you have not time to study them. 
But the men whose intellect and virtue have rendered 
them the best exponents of historical study and of the 
science of Humanity, during the last half century, 
have deduced from them some of the characteristics 
of our Law of life. 

They have discovered that our human nature is 
essentially social and susceptible of education. They 


PUTIES TOWARDS YOURSELVES. 


73 


have discerned that, as there is and can be but one 
sole God, so there is and can be but one sole Law, 
governing alike individual and collective man. They 
have discerned that the fundamental character of 
this law is PROGRESS. 

From this truth—irrefutable, because confirmed by 
every branch of human knowledge—are deduced all 
your duties towards yourselves, and also all your 
rights. The last may be summed up in one, viz.: 
the right to be in no ivay impeded, and to be to a certain 
extent assisted, in the fulfillment of your duties. You 
are, and you feel within you that you are, free agents. 
All the sophisms of the wretched philosophy that 
seeks to substitute the doctrine of I know not what 
fatalism for the cry of our human conscience, avail 
not to silence the two invincible witnesses in favour 
of human liberty— Remorse and Martyrdom. 

From Socrates to Jesus, from Jesus down to men 
who, from time to time, still die for their country, all 
the martyrs of Faith protest against the servile doc¬ 
trine, and cry aloud unto you: “We also loved life, 
we also loved the beings who made that life dear, 
and who implored us to yield. Every impulse of our 
hearts cried LIVE! But, for the salvation of the 
generations to come, we chose to die.” 

From Cain down to the vulgar spy of the present 
day, all the betrayers of their fellows, all the men 
who have chosen the path of evil, have heard and 
hear in the depths of their secret soul a voice of 
blame, disquiet, and reproof, which says unto them : 
“ Wherefore did you forsake the right path ? ” 

You are free agents, and therefore responsible. 
From this moral liberty results your right to political 


74 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


liberty, your duty to achieve it and maintain it invio¬ 
late; and the duty of others not to restrain you 
therein. 

You are susceptible of education. There is in each 
of you a certain sum of moral tendencies and intel¬ 
lectual capacity to which education alone can give 
life and movement, and which, if uneducated, remain 
inert and sterile, or but reveal themselves by fits, 
and without regular development. Education is the 
bread of the soul. Even as physical organic life is 
unable to flourish and expand without material ali¬ 
ment, so does our moral and intellectual life require 
for its expansion and manifestation the external influ¬ 
ence, and the assimilation—in part at least—of the 
affections and tendencies of others. 

Individual life springs up like the flower. Each 
variety is gifted with a special existence and a special 
character, though growing upon the common soil 
and nourished by the elements common to the life of 
all. The individual is an offshoot of Humanity, and 
aliments and renews its vital forces in the vital force 
of Humanity. This work of alimentation and reno¬ 
vation is accomplished by Education, which trans¬ 
mits (directly or indirectly) to the individual the 
results of the progress of the whole human race. 
Education, therefore, is not merely a necessity of 
your true life; it is also a holy communion with 
your fellow-men, with the generations who lived (that 
is to say, thought and acted) before you, that you are 
bound to obtain for yourselves; it is a moral and intel¬ 
lectual education, which should embrace and fecundate 
all the faculties which God has given you, even as seed 
to fructify, and as the means with which to constitute 


DUTIES TOWARDS YOURSELVES. 


75 


and maintain the link between your individual life 
and the life of collective Humanity. 

And in order that this work of education may be 
more rapidly achieved, in order that your individual 
life may be more intimately and surely linked with 
the collective life of your brothers (the life of 
Humanity), God has created you beings eminently 
social. 

Each of the inferior beings can live alone, without 
communion save with Nature, with the elements of 
the physical world. You cannot. You have need of 
your brother-men at every step, and cannot satisfy 
the simplest wants of your existence without aiding 
yourself by their work. Superior to all other beings 
when in association with your fellows, you are, when 
isolated, inferior in force to many of the lower ani¬ 
mals, weak, and incapable of development and of 
fullness of life. All the noblest aspirations of your 
heart,—such as love of country—even the least elevated 
—such as the desire of glory and praise,—indicate 
your innate tendency to mingle your existence with 
the life of the millions by whom you are surrounded. 

You are, then, created for Association. 

Association centuples your strength; it makes the 
thoughts of others, and the progress of others, your 
own, while it elevates and sanctifies your nature 
through the affections and the growing sentiment of 
the unity of the human family. In proportion as 
your association with your brother-men is extended, 
in proportion as it is intimate and comprehensive, 
will you advance on the path of individual improve¬ 
ment. The Law of Life cannot be fulfilled in its en¬ 
tirety save by the united labour of all. For every 


76 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


step taken in progress, for every new discovery of a 
portion of that Law, history shows a corresponding 
extension of human association, a more extended 
contact and communication between peoples and 
peoples. 

Before the first Christians came to declare the 
unity of human nature, in opposition to the pagan 
philosophy that admitted two human natures (that 
of the master and that of the slave), the Roman 
people had already carried their eagles across all the 
known countries of Europe. 

Before the papacy (baleful to mankind at the 
present day, but useful during the first ages of its 
institution) proclaimed the superiority of Spiritual to 
Temporal Authority , the barbarian invaders had vio¬ 
lently brought into contact the Latin and Germanic 
worlds. 

Before the idea of liberty—as applied not only to 
individuals but to peoples—had produced the con¬ 
ception of Nationality which now agitates and is des¬ 
tined to triumph in Europe, the wars of the Revolu¬ 
tion and the Empire had aroused and called into 
action an element until then remote, the Slavonian 
peoples. 

Finally you are progressive beings. 

This word of PROGRESS, unknown to antiquity, 
is destined henceforth to be a sacred word to Human¬ 
ity. In it is included an entire social, political, and 
religious transformation. The ancients, the men of 
the old Oriental and Pagan religions, believed in 
fate, in chance, in a hidden, incomprehensible power, 
the arbitrator of human things; a power alternately 
creator and destroyer, the action of which man was 


DUTIES TOWARDS YOURSELVES. 


77 


neither able to understand, accelerate, nor promote. 
They believed man to be incapable of founding any 
stable or permanent work on earth. They believed 
that nations, destined to move forever in a circle 
similar to that described by individuals here below, 
arose, became powerful, and sank in decay, doomed 
infallibly to perish. 

With a mental horizon thus restricted, and desti¬ 
tute of all historical knowledge save that of their 
own nation, or it might be of their own city, they re¬ 
garded the human race as a mere aggregate of men, 
without any general collective Life or Law, and based 
their ideas soleiy upon the contemplation of the indi¬ 
vidual. The natural consequence of such a doctrine 
was a disposition to accept all dominant and ruling 
facts, without hoping or endeavouring to modify 
them. Where circumstances had produced a repub¬ 
lican form of government, the men of that day were 
republicans; where despotism existed, they were its 
submissive slaves, indifferent to progress. And both 
under the republican and tyrannic governments, the 
human family was everywhere divided, either into 
four castes, as in the East, or into two (the free citi¬ 
zens and the slaves), as in Greece. This division 
into castes, and the doctrine of the two natures of 
men, were accepted by all, even by the most power¬ 
ful intellects of the Greek world, Plato and Aristotle. 
The emancipation of your class would have been an 
impossibility among such men as these. 

The men who, with the word of Christ upon their 
lips, founded a Religion superior to paganism or the 
religions of the East, had but dimly foreseen, not 
grasped or assimilated, the sacred idea contained in 


78 THE DUTIES OF MAN. 

this word Progress. They understood the idea of the 
unity of the human race, and the unity of the Law; 
they understood the idea of the perfectibility of man, 
but they did not comprehend that God has given 
man the power of realizing it by his own efforts, nor 
the mode by which it has to be achieved. They also 
limited themselves to deducing the rule of life from 
the contemplation of the individual. Humanity, as 
a collective being, remained unknown to them. 

They comprehended the idea of a Providence, and 
substituted it for the Fatality of tne ancients; but in 
this Providence they saw only the protector of the 
individual, not the law of Humanity. Finding them¬ 
selves placed between the immense ideal of perfecti¬ 
bility they had faintly conceived, and the poor, brief 
life of the individual, they felt the necessity of an in¬ 
termediate term or link between man and God; but, 
not having reached the idea of collective Humanity, 
they had recourse to that of a divine incarnation, and 
declared faith in this dogma to be the sole source of 
strength, of salvation, of grace to men. 

Not suspecting the continuous Revelation trans¬ 
mitted from God to man, through Humanity, they 
believed in a unique, immediate Revelation, vouch¬ 
safed at a particular time, and by a special favor of 
God. They perceived the link that unites man with 
his Creator, but they perceived not the link that 
unites all men, past, present, and future, in Humanity 
on earth. 

The sequence of generations being of little moment 
to those who comprehended nothing of the action of 
one genenation on another, they accustomed them¬ 
selves to disregard it. They endeavoured to detach 


DUTIES TOWARDS YOURSELVES. 


79 


man from the earth, from all that regarded Human¬ 
ity at large, and ended by regarding the earth itself 
(which.they abandoned to the existing powers, and 
deemed a mere sojourn of expiation) as in antago¬ 
nism to that Heaven to which man might, by the 
help of faith and grace, ascend, but from which all 
wanting in faith and grace were exiled. 

Believing Revelation to have been immediate and 
unique at a given period, they thence deduced the 
impossibility of all addition thereunto, and the conse¬ 
quent infallibility of its depositaries. They forgot 
that the Founder of their religion had come, not to 
destroy the law, but to add to and continue it: they 
forgot the solemn occasion when, with a sublime in¬ 
tuition of the future, Jesus declared “ that He had 
many things yet to say, but men could not bear them 
then, but after Him would come the Spirit of Truth, 
who would speak not of himself, but whatsoever he 
should hear, that he should speak” (St. John, xvi. 
7, 12, 13, 25, etpassim), words prophetic of the idea of 
Progress, of collective inspiration, and of the con¬ 
tinuous revelation of the truth through the medium 
of Humanity. 

The whole edifice of the Faith that succeeded pa¬ 
ganism is founded on the bases I have described. It 
is clear that your earthly emancipation cannot be 
founded upon these bases alone. 

Thirteen hundred years after the above sublime 
words of Jesus were spoken, a man, an Italian, the 
greatest of Italians, wrote the following truths: 

“ God is one. The Universe is a Thought of God; 
the Universe, therefore, is also One. All things 
spring from God. All things participate in the 


8o 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


Divine nature, more or less, according to the end for 
which they are created. Man is the noblest of cre¬ 
ated things. God has given to man more of -His own 
nature than to the others. Everything that springs 
from God tends towards that amount of perfecti¬ 
bility of which it is susceptible. The capacity of 
perfectibility is indefinite in man. Humanity is One. 
God has created no useless thing. Humanity exists; 
hence there must be a single aim for all men, a work 
to be achieved by all. The human race must, there¬ 
fore, work in unity, so that all the intellectual forces 
diffused among men may obtain the highest possible 
development in the sphere of thought and action. 
There exists, therefore, one Universal Religion for 
the human race.” 

The man who wrote these words was called Dante. 
Every city of Italy, when Italy shall be free, is bound 
to raise a monument to his memory, for these ideas 
contain the germ of the Religion of the Future. He 
wrote thus in Latin and Italian, in two books, en¬ 
titled De Monarchia and II Convito , works difficult of 
comprehension, and neglected at the present day 
even by the literary men of his own country. But 
ideas, once sown in the intellectual world, never die. 
Others reap and gather them up, even while forget¬ 
ting whence they sprang. All men admire the oak, 
but who thinks of the acorn from which it grew? 
The germ planted by Dante struck root, was fecun¬ 
dated from time to time by some powerful intellect, 
and the tree bore fruit towards the close of the last 
century. The idea of Progress as the Law of Life, 
accepted, developed, and verified by history and con¬ 
firmed by science, became the banner of the future. 


DUTIES TOWARDS YOURSELVES. 8l 

At the present day there is no earnest thinker with 
whom it is not the cardinal point of his labour and 
endeavour. 

We now know that the Law of life is PROGRESS 
—progress for the individual, progress for Humanity. 

Humanity fulfills the law on earth: the individual, 
on earth and elsewhere. 

One sole God, one sole Law. That Law has been, 
is, and will be, gradually but inevitably fulfilled by 
Humanity from the first moment of its existence. 

Truth does not manifest itself suddenly, nor entire, 

A continuous Revelation, from epoch to epoch, 
makes manifest to man a fragment of the truth, a 
word of the Law. 

The discovery of every one of these words modifies 
human life by a sensible advance on the path of im¬ 
provement, and constitutes a belief ’, a Faith. 

The development of the Religious Idea is, then, in¬ 
definitely progressive, and successive beliefs, each 
one developing and purifying that Idea, contribute, 
like the columns of a temple, to build up the Pan¬ 
theon of Humanity, the one grand, sole Religion of 
our earth. 

The men most blessed by God with genius and 
virtue are its Apostles; the People—the collective 
sense of Humanity—its Interpreter; accepting the 
revelation of the truth, transmitting it from genera¬ 
tion to generation, and reducing it to practice by 
applying it to the different branches and manifesta¬ 
tions of human life. 

“ Humanity is as a man who lives and learns for¬ 
ever.” 

Therefore there is not, there cannot be, infallibility 
6 


82 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


either in man or Powers; there is not, there cannot 
be, any privileged caste of depositaries or interpreters 
of the Law; there is not, there cannot be, need of any 
interpreter between God and man, save Humanity. 

God, by ordaining the accomplishment of a Provi¬ 
dential design of progressive education for Human¬ 
ity, and infusing the instinct of progress into the 
heart of every man, granted to human nature the 
capacity and the power to fulfill that design. 

Individual man, a free and responsible creature, is 
able to use or abuse the faculties given to him, in 
proportion as he follows the path of duty or yields 
to the seductions of a blind selfishness. He may thus 
delay or accelerate his own progress, but the Provi¬ 
dential design can be cancelled by no human means. 
The education of Humanity must be completed. 
Thus do we see even the barbarian invasions, which 
from time to time threaten to extinguish the existing 
civilization, result in a new civilization, superior to 
the former and diffused oyer a wider zone, and even 
individual tyranny subsequently produce a more 
rapid and vigourous growth of liberty. 

Progress, the Law, will be fulfilled on earth even 
as elsewhere. 

There is no antagonism between earth and heaven, 
and it is blasphemous to imagine that God’s earth, 
the Home He has given us, may be by us despised 
and abandoned to the influence of evil, selfishness, or 
tyranny, without sin. 

The earth is no sojourn of expiation. It is the 
home wherein we are to strive towards the realiza¬ 
tion of that ideal of the true and just of which each 
man has in his own soul the germ. It is the ladder 


DUTIES TOWARDS YOURSELVES. 


83 


towards that condition of Perfection which we can 
only reach by glorifying God in Humanity, through 
our own works, and by consecrating ourselves to 
realize in action all that we may of His design. The 
Judgment that will be held on each of us, and that 
will either decree our ascent one step on the ladder 
of Perfection, or doom us mournfully to pursue again 
the stage already trod, will be founded on the amount 
of good done to our brothers, on the degree of prog¬ 
ress to which we have aided them to ascend. 

Associatio/z, ever more intimate and more extended, 
with our fellow-men, is the means by which our 
strength will be multiplied; the field wherein we ful¬ 
fill our duties and reduce the Law of Progress to 
action. We must strive to make of Humanity one 
single family, every member of which shall be him¬ 
self a reflection of the moral law, for the benefit of the 
others. And as the gradual perfection of Humanity 
is accomplished from epoch to epoch, from generation 
to generation, so the perfection of the individual is 
wrought out from existence to existence, more or less 
rapidly in proportion to our own labour and effort. 

These are some of the truths contained in that 
word Progress, from which the Religion of the Future 
will spring. In its name only can your emancipation 
be achieved. 


CHAPTER VIII. 


LIBERTY. 

% 

You live. The life that is in you is not the work of 
chance; the word chance is void of meaning, and was 
invented to express the ignorance of mankind in cer¬ 
tain things. The life which is in you comes from 
God, and in its progressive development it reveals an 
intelligent design. Your life, then, has necessarily a 
scope, an aim. 

The ultimate aim for which we were created is still 
unknown to us; it cannot be otherwise; but this is no 
reason why we should deny its existence. Does the 
infant know the aim toward which it must tend 
thropgh the Family, the Country, and Humanity? 
No; but this aim exists, and we are beginning to 
comprehend it for him. Humanity is the infant of 
God: He knows the end and aim towards which it 
must develop itself. 

Humanity is only now beginning to understand 
that Progress is the Law. It is beginning vaguely to 
comprehend somewhat of the universe by which it is 
surrounded: but the majority of the individuals that 
compose it are still incapable, through barbarism, 
slavery, or the absolute absence of all education, of 
studying that Law and obtaining a knowledge of that 
universe, both of which it is necessary to compre¬ 
hend before we can truly know ourselves. 


LIBERTY. 


85 


Only a minority of the men who people our little 
Europe are as yet capable of developing themselves 
towards the right use and understanding of their 
own intellectual faculties. 

Amongst yourselves, deprived as the greater num¬ 
ber of you are of instruction, and bowed down beneath 
the necessity of an ill-organized physical labour, 
those faculties lie dormant, and are unable to bring 
their tribute to raise the pyramid of science. How, 
then, should we pretend as yet to understand that 
which will require the associate labour of the whole ? 
Wherefore rebel against our not having already 
achieved that which will constitute the last stage of 
Progress, while, few in number, and still disunited, 
we are but learning to lisp its sacred name? 

Let us resign ourselves, then, to our ignorance of 
those things which must yet a long while remain in¬ 
accessible to us, and let us not in childish anger 
abandon the study of the truths we may discover. 
Impatience and human pride have destroyed or mis¬ 
led more souls than deliberate wickedness. This is 
the truth which the ancients sought to express when 
they told us how the despot who strove to scale the 
heavens succeeded only in building a Babel of confu¬ 
sion, and how the giants who attacked Olympus 
were cast down by thunderbolts, and buried beneath 
our volcanic mountains. 

That of which it is important to be convinced is 
this, that whatever be the end and aim towards which 
we are created, we can only reach it through the 
progressive development and exercise of our intellec¬ 
tual faculties. Our faculties are the instruments of 
labour given to us by God. It is, therefore, a neces- 


86 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


sity that their development be aided and promoted, 
and their exercise protected and free. 

Without liberty you cannot fulfill any of your 
duties. Therefore have you a right to liberty, and a 
duty to wrest it at all risks from whatever power 
shall seek to withhold it. 

Without liberty there is no true morality, because 
if there be not free choice between good and evil, 
between devotion to the common progress and the 
spirit of selfishness, there can be no responsibility. 

Without liberty there is no true society, because 
association between free men and slaves is impos¬ 
sible; there can only exist the rule of the one over 
the others. 

Liberty is sacred, as the individual, of whose life it 
is the reflex, is sacred. Where liberty is not, life is 
reduced to a mere organic function, and when man 
allows the violation of his liberty, he is false to his 
own nature, and rebels against the decree of God. 
There is no true liberty whenever a caste, a family, 
or a man, assumes to rule over others in virtue of a 
pretended right divine, or from any privilege of birth 
or riches. Liberty must be for all men, and in rela¬ 
tion to all other men. 

God does not delegate the sovereign power to any 
individual. That degree of sovereign power which 
can be justly represented on this earth, has been en¬ 
trusted by God to Humanity, to the Nations, to So¬ 
ciety. And even that ceases, and is withdrawn from 
those collective fractions .of Humanity, whensoever 
they cease to wield it for good, and in accordance 
with the Providential design. The sovereign rule 
therefore exists of right in none, the true sovereignty 


LIBERTY. 


87 


being in the aim, and in those acts which bring us 
nearer to that. These acts, and the aim towards 
which we are advancing, must be submitted to the 
judgment of all. There is not, therefore, there can¬ 
not be, any permanent sovereignty. 

The institution which we term Government is 
merely a Management, a mission confided to a few in 
order more speedily to attain the national intent or 
Aim; and should that mission be betrayed, the power 
of management confided to those few must cease. 

Every man called to the Government is an admin¬ 
istrator of the common Thought. He should be 
elected, and be subject to have his election revoked 
whensoever he misconceives or deliberately opposes 
that Thought. 

Therefore, I repeat, there can exist neither family 
nor caste possessing the governing power in its own 
right, without a violation of your liberty. How 
could you call yourselves free, in the presence of men 
possessing the power to command you without your 
consent? The Republic is, then, the only logical and 
truly legitimate form of Government. 

You have no master save God in Heaven, and the 
People on earth. Whensoever you discover a line of 
the Law, of the will of God, you are bound to bless 
and obey it. Whensoever the people, the collective 
Unity of your brother-men, shall declare that such is 
their belief, you are bound to bow your head, and ab¬ 
stain from any act of rebellion. But there are certain 
things constituting your own individuality, and 
which are essential elements of human life. Over 
these not even the People has any right. No major¬ 
ity may decree tyranny, or destroy or alienate its own 


88 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


freedom. You cannot employ force against the People 
that should commit this suicidal act, but there exists 
and lives eternally in each of you a right of protest, 
in the manner circumstances may suggest. 

You must have liberty in all that is indispensable 
to the moral and material aliment of life; personal 
liberty, liberty of locomotion, liberty of religious 
faith; liberty of opinion upon all subjects, liberty of 
expressing that opinion through the Press, or by any 
other peaceful means; liberty of association in order 
to render that opinion fruitful by cultivation, and by 
contact with the thoughts and opinions of others; 
liberty of labour, and of trade and commerce with its 
produce; all these are things which may not be taken 
from you (save in a few exceptional cases which it is 
unnecessary here to enumerate) without your having 
a right to protest. 

No one has any right to imprison you, or subject you 
to personal espionage or restraint in the name of 
society, without telling 3^ou wherefore, celling it you 
with the least possible delay, and immediately con¬ 
ducting you before the judicial power of the country. 
No one has any right of persecution, intolerance, or 
exclusive legislation as to your religious opinion: no 
voice, save the grand, peaceful voice of Humanity, 
has any right to interpose itself between God and 
your conscience. 

God has given you the faculty of thought: no one 
has a right to suppress or restrain its expression, 
which is the act of communion 'between your soul 
and the souls of your brother-men, and is our one 
sole means of progress. 

The Press must be absolutely free. The rights of 


LIBERTY. 


89 


intellect are inviolable, and every preventive censor¬ 
ship is tyranny. Society may, however, punish the 
errors of the Press, or the teaching of crime or im¬ 
morality, just as it may punish any other description 
of error. This right of punishment (decreed in vir¬ 
tue of a solemn public judgment) is a consequence 
of our human responsibility; but every anterior inter¬ 
vention is a negation of liberty. 

The right of peaceful association is as sacred as 
thought itself. God gave us the tendency to associa¬ 
tion as a perennial means of progress, and as a pledge 
of that Unity which the human family is destined 
one day to attain. 

No power, then, has a right to limit or impede 
association. 

It is the duty of each of you to employ the life 
given him by God; to preserve it and to develop it: 
each of you, then, is bound to labour, as the sole 
means of its material support. Labour is sacred. 
No onejias a right to impede it, forbid it, or render 
it impossible by arbitrary regulations. No one has 
any right to forbid free trade in its productions. 
Your country is your lawful market, which no one 
may limit or restrain. 

But when all these various forms of liberty shall 
be held sacred, when the State shall be constituted 
according to the universal will, and in such wise that 
each individual shall have every path towards the 
free development of his faculties thrown open before 
him,—forget not that high above each and every in¬ 
dividual stands the intent and Aim which it is your 
duty to achieve, your own moral perfectibility and 
that of others, through an ever more intimate and 


9 ° 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


extended communion between all the members of 
the human family, so that the day may come when 
all shall recognize one sole Law. 

“ Your task is to found the Universal Family, to 
build up the City of God, and unremittingly to la¬ 
bour towards the active, progressive fulfillment of 
His great work in Humanity. 

“ When each of you, loving all men as brothers, 
shall reciprocally act like brothers; when each of 
you, seeking his own well-being in the well-being of 
all, shall identify his own life with the life of all, and 
his own interest with the interest of all; when each 
shall be ever ready to sacrifice himself for all the 
members of the Common Family, equally ready to 
sacrifice themselves for him; most of the evils which 
now weigh upon the human race will disappear, as 
the gathering vapours of the horizon vanish on the 
rising of the sun; and the will of God will be ful¬ 
filled, for it is His will that love shall gradually unite 
the scattered members of Humanity and organize 
them into a single whole, so that Humanity may be 
one, even as He is One.” 1 

Let not these words, the words of a man whose 
life and death were holy, and who loved the people 
and their future with an immense love, ever be for¬ 
gotten by you, my brothers. Liberty is but a means. 
Woe unto you and to your future, should you ever 
accustom yourselves to regard it as the end! Your 
own individuality has its rights and duties, which 
may not be yielded up to any, but woe unto you 
and to your future, should the respect you owe unto 


1 Lamrnenais, Livre du People , III. 



LIBERTY. 


9 1 

that which constitutes your individual life ever de¬ 
generate into the fatal crime of selfishness. 

Liberty is not the negation of all authority: it is 
the negation of every authority that fails to represent 
the Collective Aim of the nation, or that presumes to 
impose or maintain itself upon any other basis than 
that of your free consent. 

In these later days the sacred idea of liberty has 
been perverted by sophistical doctrines. Some have 
reduced it to a narrow and immoral egoism; have 
made everything, and have declared the aim of 
all social organization to be the satisfaction of its de¬ 
sires. Others have declared that all government and 
all authority are necessary evils, to be restricted and 
restrained as far as possible; that liberty has no 
limit, and that the aim of all society is that of indefi¬ 
nitely promoting liberty, which man has the right 
of using or abusing, provided his doing so result in 
no direct evil to others, and that government has no 
other mission than that of preventing'bne individual 
from injuring another. 

Reject these false doctrines, my brothers! The 
first has generated the selfishness of class; the second 
makes of society—which, well organized, would be 
the representation of your collective life and aim— 
naught better than the soldier or police officer com¬ 
missioned to maintain an external and apparent peace. 

The tendency of all such doctrines is to convert 
liberty into anarchy; to cancel the idea of collective 
moral improvement, and that mission of Progress, 
which society ought to assume. If you should un¬ 
derstand liberty thus, you would deserve to lose it, 
and sooner or later you would lose it. 


92 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


Your liberty will be sacred so long as it is governed 
by and evolved beneath an idea of duty, of faith in 
the common perfectibility. 

Your liberty will flourish, protected by God and 
man, as long as you hold it—not as the right to use 
or abuse your faculties in the direction it may please 
you to select—but as the right of free choice, accord¬ 
ing to your separate tendencies, of the means of do- 
ing good. 


CHAPTER IX. 


EDUCATION. 

God has created you susceptible of education. 
Therefore it is your duty to educate yourselves as far 
as lies in your power, and it is your right that the so¬ 
ciety to which you belong shall not impede your edu¬ 
cation, but assist you in it, and supply you with the 
means thereof when you have them not. 

Your liberty, your rights, your emancipation from 
every injustice in your social position, the task which 
each of you is bound to fulfill on earth—all these de¬ 
pend upon the degree of education you are able to 
attain. 

Without education you are incapable of rightly 
choosing between good and evil; you cannot acquire 
a true knowledge of your rights; you cannot attain 
that participation in political life without which your 
complete social emancipation is impossible; you 
cannot arrive at a correct definition and comprehen¬ 
sion of your own mission. 

Education is the bread of your soul. Without it 
your faculties lie dormant and unfruitful, even as the 
vital power lies sterile in the seed cast into untilled 
soil and deprived of the benefits of irrigation and the 
watchful labour of the agriculturist. 

At the present day your class is either uneducated 


94 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


or receives its education at the hands of men or gov¬ 
ernments, who, having no ruling principles to guide 
them, necessarily mutilate or misdirect it. Present 
directors of education imagine that they have fulfilled 
their duties towards you when they have opened a 
certain number of schools—distributed unequally 
over the territory they govern—wherein your chil¬ 
dren may receive a certain degree of elementary in¬ 
struction, consisting principally of reading, writing, 
and arithmetic. 

Such teaching is property called instruction , and it 
differs and is as distinct from true education as the 
various organs of our existence differ and are dis¬ 
tinct from our life. The organs of existence are not 
our life. They are the mere instruments of our life 
and its means of manifestation; they neither govern 
nor direct it; they are equally the manifestation of 
the holiest or the most .corrupt life; and just so does 
instruction provide the means of putting in practice 
that which is taught by education, but it can never 
take the place of education. 

Education addresses itself to the moral faculties; 
instruction to the intellectual. The first develops 
in man the knowledge of his duties; the second gives 
him the capacity of achieving them. Without in¬ 
struction, education would be too often inefficient; 
without education, instruction is a lever deprived of 
its fulcrum. 

You know how to read. What avails this know]- \ 
edge if you are unfit to judge between the books 
containing error and those containing truth? You 
have learned to communicate your thoughts to your 
fellow-men in writing. What avails this knowledge, 


EDUCATION. 


95 


if your thoughts are the mere reflex of your own 
selfishness ? 

Instruction, like wealth, is either a source of good 
or of evil, according to the manner and motive of its 
use. Consecrated to aid the progress of all, it is a 
means of civilization and of liberty; turned to more 
personal uses, it becomes an agent of tyranny and 
corruption. 

In Europe at the present day, instruction, unac¬ 
companied by a corresponding degree of moral educa¬ 
tion, is too often a serious evil; it assists in maintain¬ 
ing inequality between class and class of the same 
people, leads men to false doctrines, and produces a 
spirit of calculation, of selfishness, and of compromise 
between the just and the unjust. 

The distinction between those who offer you more 
or less of instruction and those who preach educa¬ 
tion, is more important than you are aware of, and 
deserves to be spoken of at some length. 

The camp of the liberal party in Europe at the 
present day is split up into two schools of doctrine. 

The first of these schools proclaims the sovereignty 
of the Individual. The second declares that sov¬ 
ereignty belongs to Society alone, and makes the 
manifest consent of the majority its law. 

The first imagines that it has fulfilled its mission 
when it has proclaimed the rights believed to be in¬ 
herent in human nature, and preserved liberty. The. 
second looks almost exclusively to association , and 
from the Social Pact that constitutes that association 
it deduces the duties of each individual. 

The first does not go beyond what I have termed 
instruction, for instruction does in fact tend to 


9 6 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


develop the individual faculties, without direction 
or rule. The second understands the necessity of 
education, and regards it as the manifestation of the 
social programme. 

The first inevitably tends to moral anarchy. The 
second, unmindful of liberty, runs the risk of uphold¬ 
ing despotism—the despotism of the majority. 

To the first of these schools belonged that genera¬ 
tion of men known in France as Doctrinaires , who be¬ 
trayed the hopes of the people after the revolution of 
1830, and who, by proclaiming Liberty of Instruction, 
and nothing more, perpetuated the monopoly of gov¬ 
ernment in the hands of the bourgeois class, who did 
possess the means of developing their individual 
faculties. The second, unfortunately, is only repre¬ 
sented at the present day by Powers or sects belong¬ 
ing to antiquated creeds or beliefs, and hostile to the 
dogma of the future, which is Progress. 

Both of these schools are defective. The tendency 
of both is narrow and exclusive. 

The following is the truth: 

All Sovereignty is in God, in the moral law, in the 
Providential design—which rules the world, and is 
from time to time revealed to Humanity, in different 
epochs of its existence, by virtuous Genius—in the 
Aim we have to reach, in the Mission we have to fulfill. 

Sovereignty cannot exist in the individual, nor in 
Society, except in so far as one or the other acts in 
accordance with that design and law, and tends to¬ 
wards that aim. 

The individual ruler is either the best interpreter 
of that Law, and governs in its name, or he is a 
usurper to be overthrown. 


EDUCATION. 


97 


There is no legitimate sovereignty in the mere 
Will of the majority, if it be contrary to the supreme 
moral law or deliberately close the path of future 
progress. 

The Social Weal, Liberty, and Progress: there can 
be no real sovereignty beyond these three terms. 

Education teaches in what the social weal consists. 

Instruction assures to the individual a free choice 
of the means of securing a continuous advance in the 
conception of the social weal. 

That which is most important for you is that your 
children be taught what are the ruling principles and 
beliefs directing the life of their fellow-men during 
the span of existence allotted to them on earth ; what 
the moral, social, and political programme of their 
nation ; what the spirit of the legislation by which 
their actions will be judged; what the degree of 
progress already achieved by Humanity; what the 
goal it is destined to attain. 

And it is important that they should be taught in 
their earliest years a spirit of equality and love, which 
links them in a common aim with the millions, the 
brothers given them by God. 

The education that will afford your children stich teach¬ 
ing as this , can only be given them by the nation. 

At present their moral teaching is a mere anarchy. 
Left exclusively to the parents, it is null in those cases 
where poverty and the necessity of constant material 
labour deprive them alike of the knowledge and time 
required to enable them to teach their children them¬ 
selves and of the means of providing other instruct¬ 
ors; it is evil in those cases where selfishness and cor¬ 
ruption have perverted or contaminated the family. 

7 


9 8 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


Even where parents have the means of providing in¬ 
struction for their children, they are too often brought 
up in materialism, or superstition; in ideas of mere 
liberty, or passive resignation; of aristocracy, or mere 
reaction against it, according to the character of the 
instructor—priestly or secular—whom the parents 
select. How can such education in childhood fit men 
to work together in harmony and fraternity towards 
a common aim, and to represent in their own persons 
the unity of the country? 

Society calls upon them to promote the develop¬ 
ment of a common idea in which they have not been 
instructed. Society punishes them for the violation 
of laws of which they were left in ignorance, the 
scope and spirit of which society has never taught 
them. Society requires, from them cooperation and 
sacrifice for an aim which no teachers have explained 
to them at the outset of their civil life. 

Strange to say, the Doctrinaire School of which I 
have already spoken recognizes the right of each 
separate individual to rule and teach the young, and 
does not admit the same right in the association of 
individuals, the Nation. Their cry of liberty of in¬ 
struction disinherits the Nation of all moral direction. 
They proclaim the importance of unity in the mone¬ 
tary system, and the system of weights and measures; 
but that unity of Principle, upon which all national 
life should be founded and developed, is nothing to 
them. 

Without a national education, the Nation has no 
moral existence, for upon it alone can a national con¬ 
science be formed. 

Without a national education —common to all the 


EDUCATION. 


99 


citizens —all equality of rights and duties is an un¬ 
meaning formula, for all knowledge of duties, and 
all capacity for the exercise of rights, are left to the 
chances of fortune, or the arbitrary choice of those 
who select the teacher. 

The opponents of unity of education invoke liberty 
in their support. The liberty of whom? Of the 
fathers, or of the children? In their system the 
moral liberty of the children is violated by the des¬ 
potism of the father; the liberty of the young gene¬ 
ration is sacrificed to the old; and liberty of progress 
is rendered an illusion. 

Individual opinions and beliefs—false, it may be, 
and adverse to progress—are alone-transmitted with all 
the authority of the father to the son, at an age when 
their examination is impossible. As they advance in 
life the position of the majority among you, and the 
necessity of occupying every hour in material em¬ 
ployment, will prevent the mind already stamped 
and impressed with those opinions and beliefs, from 
modifying them by comparison with- others. 

In the name of this false liberty the anarchical 
system I have described tends to perpetuate that 
worst of despotisms, a moral caste. 

This system, in fact, produces a form of despotism, 
not liberty. True liberty cannot exist without equal¬ 
ity, and equality can only exist among those who 
start from a common ground, a common principle, 
and a uniform consciousness and knowledge of duty. 
Liberty can only rightly be exercised as a conse¬ 
quence of that knowledge. 

I said a few pages back, that true liberty is not the 
right to choose evil, but the right of choice between 


IOO 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


the various paths that lead to good. The liberty in¬ 
voked by these shallow philosophers is, in fact, an 
arbitrary right 'given to the father to choose the 
wrong for his child. What! If a father should 
threaten to mutilate or in any way injure the body of 
his child, Society would interfere, called on and in¬ 
voked by all; and shall the soul of that child be of 
less worth than the body? Shall not Society inter¬ 
fere to protect him from the mutilation of his facul¬ 
ties, from ignorance, from the perversion of his moral 
sense, from superstition? 

The cry of Liberty of Instruction was of use in the 
day when it first arose, and it is useful even now in 
all countries where moral .education is the monopoly 
of a despotic government, a retrograde caste, or a 
priesthood, the nature of whose dogma renders it 
antagonistic to progress. That cry was a cry of 
emancipation, imperfect, but indispensable and neces¬ 
sary at the time. 

But I speak to you of a time in wliich Religion 
shall inscribe the word Progress over the portal of 
the Temple; when all your institutions shall be so 
many repetitions of that word in various forms, and 
when a National education shall be given to the 
people which will conclude its teachings to its pupils 
with these words: 

“To you, as beings destined to live under a com¬ 
mon Pact with ourselves, we have now declared the 
fundamental basis of that Pact; the Principles in 
which your Nation believes at the present day; but 
remember that the first of these principles is Prog¬ 
ress; remember that your mission, both as a man and 
a citizen, is to improve, as far as you may, the minds 


EDUCATION. 


IOI 


and hearts of your fellow-men. Go; examine and 
compare; and if you discover a truth superior to that 
which we believe ourselves to possess, diffuse it free¬ 
ly, and the blessing of your country be with you.” 

Then, though not before, you may renounce the 
cry of liberty of instruction as inferior to your need, 
and fatal to the unity of the country; then you may 
ask—nay, exact—the foundation of a system of 
gratuitous National Education, obligatory upo?i all. 

The Nation is bound to transmit its programme to 
every citizen. Every citizen should receive in the 
national schools a moral education, a course of nation¬ 
ality —comprising a summary view of the progress of 
Humanity and of the history of his own country; a 
popular exposition of the principles directing the 
legislation of that country, and the elementary in¬ 
struction about which we are all agreed. Every citi¬ 
zen should be taught in these schools the lesson of 
equality and love. 

The National Programme once transmitted to all 
the citizens, liberty resumes its rights. Not only 
family education, but every other is sacred. Every 
man has an unlimited right to communicate his ideas 
to his fellow-men; every man has a right to hear 
them. Society should encourage and promote the 
free utterance of thought in every shape, and open 
every path to the modification and development of 
the National Programme. 


CHAPTER X. 


ASSOCIATION. PROGRESS. 

God has created you social and progressive beings. 
It is therefore your duty to associate yourselves, and 
to progress as far as the sphere of activity in which 
circumstances have placed you, will permit. You 
have a right to demand that the society to which 
you belong shall in no way impede your work of 
association .and progress, but, on the contrary, shall 
assist you, and furnish you with the means of asso¬ 
ciation and progress of which you stand in need. 
Liberty gives you the power of choosing between 
good and evil; that is to say, between duty and 
selfishness. Education will teach you to choose 
rightly. Association will give you the means of re¬ 
ducing your choice to action. Progress, the Aim by 
which you must be guided in your choice, is, at the 
same time, when visibly achieved, the proof that your 
choice was not mistaken. Whenever anyone of these 
conditions is neglected or betrayed, the man and the. 
citizen do not exist, or exist in a state of imperfection 
and impeded development. 

You have therefore to strive to realize all these 
conditions, and above all, the right of association; 
without which both liberty and education are use¬ 
less. 


ASSOCIATION. PROGRESS. 


103 


The right of association is as sacred as Religion 
itself, which is the association of souls. You are all 
the sons of God; you are therefore brothers. Who, 
then, may without guilt set limits to association, the 
communion among brothers ? 

This word communion , which I have written advis¬ 
edly, was taught us by Christianity, which the men 
of the past declared to be an immutable religion, but 
which is, in fact, a step in the scale of the religious 
manifestations of Humanity. 

And it is a sacred word. It taught mankind that 
they were a single family of equals before God, and 
united master and servant in a single thought of sal¬ 
vation, of love, and of hope in Heaven. It was an 
immense advance upon the preceding ages, when both 
philosophers and people believed the souls of citi¬ 
zens and the souls of slaves to be of different nature 
and race. And this mission alone would have suf¬ 
ficed to stamp the greatness of Christianity. The 
communion was the symbol of the equality and 
fraternity of souls, and it rested with Humanity to 
amplify and develop the truth hidden under that 
symbol. 

The Church did not and could not do this. Timid 
and uncertain in the beginning, and allied with the 
nobles and the Temporal Powers in the sequel, im¬ 
bued, from self-interest, with an aristocratic ten¬ 
dency which had no existence in the mind of its 
founder, the Church wandered out of the true path, 
and even receded so far as to diminish the moral 
value of the communion, by limiting it in the case of 
the laity to a communion in bread alone, and reserv¬ 
ing solely to priests the communion in both species. 


io4 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


At that time arose a cry from all that felt within 
their souls the right of the whole human family to 
the symbols of unlimited communion without dis¬ 
tinction between the laity and ecclesiastics: Commun¬ 
ion in both species for the peoplej the Cup for the people ! 
In the fifteenth century that cry became the watch¬ 
word of the aroused multitudes; it was the prelude 
to the Religious Reformation, and was sanctified by 
martyrdom. A holy man, named John Huss, of Bo¬ 
hemia, who was the leader of that movement, per¬ 
ished in the flames kindled by the Inquisition. 

At the present day, most of you are ignorant'of the 
history of those struggles, or believe them to have 
been the quarrels of fanatics about merely theologi¬ 
cal questions. But when a national education shall 
have popularized history, and taught you how every 
religious progress carries with it a corresponding 
progress in civil life, you will appreciate those con¬ 
tests at their true worth, and honor the memory of 
those martyrs as your benefactors. We owe it to 
those martyrs and their predecessors that we have 
learned that there is no privileged class of interpre¬ 
ters between God and the people ; that the best 
among us in wisdom and virtue may and ought to 
counsel and direct us on the path of improvement, 
but without any monopoly of power or supremacy; 
and that the right of communion is indeed equal for 
all men. That which is holy in Heaven is holy on earth, 
and the communion of mankind in God carries with 
R the association of mankind in their terrestrial life. 
The religious association of souls carries with it the 
association of intellect, and of action which converts 
thought into reality. 


ASSOCIATION. PROGRESS. 


io 5 

Consider association, therefore, both your duty and 
your right. 

There are those who seek to put a limit to the 
rights of the citizen, by telling you that the true asso¬ 
ciation is the State, the Nation: that you ought all to 
be members of that association, but that every par¬ 
tial association amongst yourselves, is either adverse 
to the State, or superfluous. 

But the State, the Nation, only represents the asso¬ 
ciation of the citizens in those matters and in those 
tendencies which are common to all the men who 
compose it. There are tendencies and aims which do 
not embrace all the citizens, but only a certain number 
of them. And precisely as the tendencies and the 
aims which are common to all, constitute the Nation; 
so the tendencies and aims which are common to a 
portion of the citizens, should constitute special asso¬ 
ciations. 

Moreover—and this is the fundamental basis of the 
right of association—association is a guarantee of 
progress. The State represents a certain number or 
mass of principles, in which the citizens are agreed at 
the time of its foundation. Suppose that a new and 
true principle, a new and rational development of the 
truths that have given vitality to the State, should be 
discovered by a few among its citizens. How shall 
they diffuse the knowledge of this principle, except 
by association? Suppose that, in consequence of 
scientific discovery, or of new means of communica¬ 
tion opened up between peoples and peoples, or from 
any other cause, a new interest should arise among a 
certain number of the individuals composing the 
State, how shall they who first perceive this, make 


io6 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


their way among the various interests of long stand' 
ing, unless by uniting their efforts and their means? 

Inertia, and a disposition to rest satisfied with the 
order of things long existing and sanctioned by the 
common consent, are habits too powerful over the 
minds of most men to allow a single individual to 
overcome them by his solitary work. The associa¬ 
tion of a daily increasing minority can do this. Asso¬ 
ciation is the method of the future. Without it the 
State would remain motionless, enchained to the de¬ 
gree of civilization already reached. 

Association must be progressive in the scope it en¬ 
deavours to attain, and not contrary to those truths 
which have been conquered forever by the uni¬ 
versal consent of Humanity and of the Nation. An 
association founded for the purpose of facilitat¬ 
ing theft of the property of others; an association 
obliging its members to polygamy; an association 
which should preach the dissolution of the Nation or 
the establishment of despotism, would be illegal. 
The Nation has the right of declaring to its members: 
“We cannot tolerate the diffusion among us of doc¬ 
trines in violation of that which constitutes human 
nature, morality, or the country. Go forth and es¬ 
tablish amongst yourselves, beyond our frontiers, the 
associations which your tendencies suggest.” 

Association must be peaceful. It may not use other 
weapons than-the apostolate of the spoken and written 
word. Its object must be to persuade, not to compel. 

Association must be public . Secret associations— 
which are a legitimate weapon of defence where 
there exists neither liberty nor Nation—are illegal, 
and ought to be dissolved, wherever liberty and the 


ASSOCIATION. PROGRESS. 


107 

inviolability of thought are rights recognized and 
protected by the country. As the scope and in¬ 
tent of association is to open the paths of progress 
it must be submitted to the examination and judg¬ 
ment of all. 

And, finally, association is bound to respect in others 
those rights which spring from the essential characteris¬ 
tics of human nature. An association which, like the 
corporations of the Middle Ages, should violate the 
rights of labour, or which should tend directly to 
restrict liberty of conscience, ought to be repressed 
by the government of the Nation. 

With these exceptions, liberty of association among 
the citizens is as sacred and inviolable as that prog¬ 
ress of which it is the life. 

Every government which attempts to restrain it 
betrays its social mission, and it becomes the duty of 
the people first to admonish it, and—all peaceful 
means being exhausted—to overthrow it. 

Such, my brothers, are the bases upon which your 
duties are founded, the sources from which spring 
your rights. An infinite number of questions will 
arise in the course of your civil life, which it is no 
part of the present work either to foresee, or to assist 
you in resolving. My sole aim in this book has been 
to present to you, even as torches to light you on 
your way, those Principles which should guide you 
through them all, and in the earnest application of 
which, you will find a method of resolving them for 
yourselves. 

And this I believe I have done. 

I have led you to God, as the source of duty and 
pledge of the equality of man: to the Moral Law, as 


io8 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


the source of all civil laws and basis of your every 
judgment as to the conduct of those who frame those 
laws. I have pointed out to you the People—-'your¬ 
selves, ourselves, the mass of the citizens compos¬ 
ing the Nation—as the sole interpreter of the law, and 
the source of all political power. I have told you that 
the fundamental characteristic of the law is Prog¬ 
ress; progress indefinite and continuous from epoch 
to epoch; progress in every branch of human activity, 
in every manifestation of thought, from leligion 
down to industry and to the distribution of wealth. 
I have described to you your duties towards Human¬ 
ity, your country, your family, and yourselves. And 
I have deduced those duties from those essential 
characteristics which constitute the human creature, 
and which it is your task to develop. 

These characteristics—inviolable in every man— 
are: liberty, susceptibility of education, the social 
tendency, and the capacity for, and necessity of, 
progress. And from these characteristics—without 
which there is neither true man nor true citizen possi¬ 
ble—I have deduced, not your duties only, but your 
rights, and the general character of the government 
you should seek for your country. 

Never forget these principles. Watch that they 
never be violated. Incarnate them in yourselves. 
You will be free, and you will improve. 

The task I have undertaken for you would then be 
complete, were it not for a tremendous obstacle aris¬ 
ing in the bosom of Society itself (as it is now consti¬ 
tuted), to the possibility of your fulfilling your duties 
or exercising your rights. 

This obstacle is the inequality of means. 


ASSOCIATION. PROGRESS. IO9 

In order to fulfill duties and exercise rights—time, 
intellectual development, and the certainty of mate¬ 
rial existence, are necessary. 

Now, very many of you do not possess these first 
elements of progress. Their life is a constant and 
uncertain battle in order to conquer the means of 
material existence. For them, the question is not 
one of progress , but of life itself. 

There is, then, some deep and radical vice in the 
present organization of society. And my work would 
be rendered useless were I not to define that vice, 
and indicate a method of correcting it. 

The economical question will therefore constitute 
the last portion of my work. 


CHAPTER XL 


THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. 

Many, too many, of you are poor. Life for at least 
three-fourths of the working class, whether labourers 
or mechanics, is a daily struggle to obtain the indis¬ 
pensable material means of existence. They are occu¬ 
pied in manual labour for ten, twelve, sometimes 
fourteen, hours a day, and by this constant, monoto¬ 
nous, and painful industry, they scarcely gain the 
bare necessaries of physical existence. The attempt 
to teach such men the duty of progress, to speak to 
them of their intellectual and moral life, of their 
political rights, or of education, is sheer irony in the 
present state of things. 

They have neither time nor means to improve and 
progress. Wearied, worn-out, half-stupefied by a life, 
consumed in a round of petty and mechanical toil, all 
they do learn is a mute, impotent, and often unjust, 
rancour against the class of men who employ them. 
They too often seek forgetfulness of the troubles of 
the day and the uncertainty of the morrow in the 
stimulus of strong drink, and sink to rest in places 
better described as dens than rooms, to waken to a 
repetition of the same dull exercise of their merely 
physical powers. 

It is a sad condition, and it must be altered. 


THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. 


Ill 


You are men, and as such you possess faculties, not 
merely physical, but intellectual and moral: faculties 
which it is your duty to develop. You should be 
citizens, and, as such, exercise for the good of all cer¬ 
tain rights, which require a certain degree of educa¬ 
tion and a certain portion of time. 

It is clear that you ought to labour less and gain 
more than you do now. 

Sons of God, all of us, and brethren in Him and 
amongst ourselves, we are called to constitute one 
sole great Family. 

In this family there may exist such inequality as is 
he result of diversity of aptitude, of capacity, or of 
disposition for labour, but it should be governed by 
one single principle: Whosoever is willing to give—for 
the benefit of the whole—that amount of labour of which 
he is capable, ought to receive such amount of recompense 
for that labour as will enable him more or less to develop 
his individual life in each of the essential characteristics 
by which individual life is defined. 

This is the ideal which all of us ought to strive and 
study to approach more nearly from age to age. 

Every change, every revolution which fails to ad¬ 
vance us one step towards this ideal, which does not 
produce a moral and social progress corresponding 
to the political progress achieved, which does not re¬ 
sult in one degree of improvement in the material 
condition of the poorer classes, violates the Providen¬ 
tial design, and reduces itself to the rank of a mere 
war of faction against faction, each seeking illegiti¬ 
mate dominion, and each alike a falsehood and an 
evil. 

But up to what point can we realize this aim at the 


I 12 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


present day ? How, and by what means can we 
reach this point ? 

Some of the more timid amongst your well-wishers 
have sought the remedy in the morality of the work¬ 
ingman himself. They have founded savings-banks 
and similar institutions, saying to the operative : 
“ Bring your wages here ; economize, abstain from 
every excess, whether of drink or otherwise; emanci¬ 
pate yourselves from poverty by * privation.” And 
such advice is excellent, in so far as it tends to the 
moral improvement of the workingman, without which 
all reforms are useless. But it neither solves the 
question of poverty itself, nor takes any account of 
social duty. 

Very few of you can economize your wages. And 
all that those few can achieve by their slow accumu¬ 
lation is the possibility of providing, to a certain ex¬ 
tent, for their old age. Now, the economical ques¬ 
tion has more than this in view. Its object is also to 
provide for the years of manhood, to develop and ex¬ 
pand life , as far as possible, while in its full vigour and 
activity, while it may most efficaciously aid the prog¬ 
ress of the country and humanity. 

Even with regard to the mere material well-being 
of the working class this advice falls short of the aim, 
as it does not even hint at any method of increasing 
wealth or production. Moreover, society, which 
lives by the labour of the sons of the people, and de¬ 
mands from them their tribute of blood in the hour 
of danger, incurs a sacred' debt towards them in 
return. 

There are other men, not enemies of the people, 
but indifferent to the cry of suffering which bursts 


THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. 113 

from the hearts of the sons of labour, and fearful of 
every great innovation, who belong to the school of 
Economists, and who have worthily and usefully 
fought the battle of industry and labour, but without 
reflecting that the necessity of Progress and of Asso¬ 
ciation is an ineradicable element of human nature. 

This school has maintained, and still—like the 
Philanthropists of whom I have spoken—does main¬ 
tain, that every one can , even in the present state of 
things, build up his own independence on his own 
activity, that any change in the organization of 
labour would be either injurious or superfluous, and 
that the formula, Each for himself arid liberty for us 
ally is sufficient to create, by degrees, an approximate 
equilibrium of ease and comfort among the various 
classes that constitute society. 

Liberty of internal traffic, liberty of commerce 
among nations, a progressive reduction of custom 
duties (especially upon raw materials), a general 
encouragement offered to great industrial enter¬ 
prises, to the multiplication of means of communica¬ 
tion and of all machinery tending to increase activity 
of production; these, according to the EconomistSy are 
all that society can offer for the amelioration of the 
position of your class, and any further intervention 
on its part would, in their opinion, be a source of 
evil. 

If this were indeed true, the evil of poverty would 
be incurable; but God forbid, my brothers ! that I 
should ever give your sufferings and your aspirations 
an answer so despairing, atheistic, and immoral. 
God has ordained for you a better future than that 
offered by the remedies of the Economists. 

8 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


114 

Their remedies, in fact, merely point to the possi¬ 
ble and temporary increase of the production of 
wealth; they do not tend to its more equitable distri¬ 
bution. While the Philanthropists , regarding indi¬ 
vidual man alone, content themselves with the 
endeavour to make him more moral, without seeking 
to increase the common prosperity so as to give him 
an opportunity of progress ; the Economists think 
only of increasing the source's of production, without 
occupying themselves with the condition of the indi¬ 
vidual man. Under the exclusive regime of liberty 
which they preach, and which has more or less regu • 
lated the economical world in these later days, the 
most irrefutable documentary evidence has shown an 
increase of productive activity and of capital, but 
not of universally diffused prosperity. 

The misery of the working class is unchanged. 
Liberty of competition for him who possesses nothing 
—for him who, unable to save his daily earnings, can¬ 
not even initiate a competition—is a lie; even as po¬ 
litical liberty is a lie for those who, from want of edu. 
cation, instruction, time and material means, are 
unable to exercise their rights. Increased facilities 
for the exchange and conveyance of the products of 
labour would by degrees emancipate labour from the 
tyranny of trade and commerce, and from the exist¬ 
ing classes of intermediates between the producer 
and the consumer, but they cannot emancipate 
it from the tyranny of capital ; they cannot 
give the means of labour to him who has them 
not. 

And from the want of an equal distribution of 
wealth, and of a just division of products, combined 


THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION 


ll 5 

with the progressive increase of the number of con¬ 
sumers, capital itself is turned aside from its true 
economic aim, and becomes in part stationary in the 
hands of a few, instead of spreading and circulating; 
or it is directed towards the production of objects of 
superfluity, luxury, and fictitious wants, instead of 
being concentrated on the production of objects 
of primary necessity to life, and is risked in perilous, 
and, too often, immoral speculations. 

At the present day—and this is the curse of o.ur 
actual social economy—capital is the tyrant of labour. 
Society is at present composed—economically speak¬ 
ing—of three classes: that is to say, of capitalists , be¬ 
ing the possessors of the means and implements of 
labour, of land, of factories, ready money, and raw 
material; of middlemen , chiefs and organizers of labour, 
and dealers, who are, or ought to be, the representa¬ 
tives of the intellectual side; and of operatives , who 
represent the material side of labour. 

The first of these three classes is sole master of the 
field, and is in a position to promote, accelerate, de¬ 
lay, or direct labour towards certain special aims at 
will. And the share of this class of the results of 
labour and the value of production is comparatively 
settled and defined; the location of the instruments 
of labour is variable only within certain known and 
definite limits; and even time itself may be said to be, 
to some extent, in their power, as they are removed 
from the pressure of immediate want. 

The share of the second class is uncertain. It de¬ 
pends upon their intellect, their activity, and, above 
all, on circumstances, such as the greater or less 
development of competition and the flux and reflux 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


116 

of capital, which is regulated by events not within 
the reach of their calculations. 

The workman’s share consists simply of his wages, 
determined previously to the execution of the work, 
and without regard to the greater or less profits of 
the undertaking; and the limits within which those 
wages vary are determined by the relation that ex¬ 
ists between the supply and demand, or, in other 
words, between the population of operatives . and 
capital. 

Now, as the first constantly tends to increase, and 
to an increase generally superior (however slightly) 
to the increase of the second, the tendency of wages, 
where no other causes intervene, is, of course, to 
decrease. 

Time, also, is altogether beyond the power of the 
workingman. Financial and political crises, the sud¬ 
den application of new machinery to the different 
branches of industrial activity, the irregularities of 
production, and its frequent excess and accumulation 
in a given direction (an evil inseparable from partially 
enlightened competition), the unequal distribution of 
the working classes upon certain points, or in certain 
branches of activity, and a hundred other causes 
tending to the interruption of labour, take from the 
operative all free choice as to his own condition. On 
the one side he sees absolute starvation, on the other 
the necessity of accepting whatever terms are offered 
to him. 

Such a state of things, I repeat, indicates the germ 
of a moral evil which must be cured. 

The remedies proposed both by the Philanthropists 
and Economists are unequal to this task. 


THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. 


117 

And, nevertheless, there is progress in the class to 
which you belong; a progress historical and continu¬ 
ous, and which has overcome still greater difficul¬ 
ties. 

You were first slaves, then serfsj now you are 
hirelings. You have emancipated yourselves from 
slavery and from serfdom. Why should you not 
emancipate yourselves from the yoke of hire, and 
become free producers, and masters of the totality of 
production which you create ? 

Wherefore should you not accomplish, through 
your own peaceful endeavours and the assistance of a 
society having sacred duties towards each of its mem¬ 
bers, the most beautiful Revolution that can be con¬ 
ceived—a revolution which, accepting labour as the 
commercial basis of human intercourse, and the 
fruits of labourlis the basis of property, should grad¬ 
ually abolish the class distinctions, the tyrannical 
dominion of one element of labour over another, and 
by proclaiming one sole law of just equilibrium 
between production and consumption, harmonize 
and unite all the children of the Country, the com¬ 
mon mother ? 

Owing principally to the teachings of the republi¬ 
can party, the sense of a social duty towards the sons 
of labour—the earnest of a better future for the peo¬ 
ple—had gradually been awakened in Europe dur¬ 
ing the last thirty years, when certain schools arose 
(in France especially), composed for the most part of 
well-meaning and sincere friends of the people, but 
led astray by an overweaning love of system-making, 
and by individual vanity. 

These schools introduced certain exclusive and ex- 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


118 

aggerated doctrines under the name of Socialism —doc¬ 
trines frequently antagonistic to the wealth already 
acquired by other classes, as well as economically im¬ 
possible. By terrifying the multitude of smaller shop¬ 
keepers, and creating a sense of distrust between the 
different classes of citizens, they caused the social 
question to recede, and split up the republican party 
into two separate camps. 

I cannot now pause to examine these different 
schools one by one. They were called Saint Simon- 
ianism, Fourierism, Communism, etc., etc. Nearly 
all of them were based upon ideas good in them¬ 
selves, and long accepted by all who belonged to the 
creed of Progress, but they spoiled or nullified these 
ideas by the erroneous and tyrannical methods by 
which they proposed to apply and reduce them to 
practice. And it is necessary that I should briefly 
point out to you wherein their errors consisted, be¬ 
cause the promises held out to the people by these 
systems are so magnificent as to be likely to seduce 
your approval, and you would run the risk, by accept¬ 
ing them, of retarding your emancipation, which is 
inevitable in a not far distant future. 

It is true—and this fact alone should awaken a 
strong sense of doubt in your minds—that when cir¬ 
cumstances had placed some of the authors of these 
systems in power, they never attempted to realize 
their own doctrines in practice. Giants on paper, 
they dwindled and shrank before the difficulties of 
the practical reality. 

If, at some future day, you examine these various 
systems with attention—bearing in mind the funda¬ 
mental ideas I have hitherto pointed out to you, and 


THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION, 


II 9 


the indestructible characteristics of human nature, 
you will find that they all of them violate some of 
these characteristics, as well as the law of progress, 
and the method of its accomplishment through Hu¬ 
manity. 

Progress is accomplished through laws which no 
human power can break. It is accomplished step by 
step, by the perpetual development and modiftcatio?i of 
the elements which manifest the activity of life. 

In certain epochs, in certain countries, and under 
the influence of certain errors or prejudices, men 
have frequently given the name of essential elements 
and characteristics of social life to things which have 
no root in nature, but only in the conventional cus¬ 
toms of an erring society—customs which disap¬ 
peared at the expiration of those epochs, or beyond 
the limits of those countries. 

But you may discern what are the true elements 
inseparable from our human nature, first, by in¬ 
terrogating—as I suggested elsewhere—the instincts 
of your own souls, and then by testing and verifying 
these by the tradition of all the ages, and of every 
country, in order to judge whether those instincts are 
such as have always been the instincts of Humanity. 
And those things which the innate voice within your¬ 
selves and the grand voice of Humanity alike de¬ 
clare to be essential elements, constitutive of life 
itself, have to be modified and developed from epoch 
to epoch, but can never be abolished. 

Among the essential elements of human life—such 
as Religion, Association, Liberty, and others to which 
I have alluded in the course of this work—Property 


is one, 


120 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


The first principle and origin of property is in hu¬ 
man nature itself. It represents the necessities of 
the material life of the individual, which it is his 
duty to maintain. Even as the individual is bound 
to transform the moral and intellectual world, 
through the medium of religion, science, and liberty, 
so he is bound to transform, ameliorate, and govern 
the physical world, through the medium of material 
labour. And property is the sign and representative 
of the fulfillment of that task, of the amount of la¬ 
bour by which the individual has transformed, devel¬ 
oped, and increased, the productive forces of nature. 

The Principle of property is therefore eternal, and 
you will find it recognized and protected throughout 
the whole existence of Humanity. But the modes by 
which it is governed are mutable, and destined—like 
every other manifestation of life—to undergo the law 
of Progress. They who, finding property once con¬ 
stituted and established in a certain manner, declare 
that manner to be inviolable, and struggle against 
every effort to transform it, thus deny progress 
itself. 

It is enough to take up two volumes of history, 
treating of two different epochs, to find an alteration 
in the constitution of property. And they who, be¬ 
cause at a given epoch they happen to find property 
ill-constituted, declare that it must be abolished and 
seek to cancel it from Society, deny one of the ele¬ 
ments of human nature, and would—were it possible 
they should succeed—retard progress by mutilating 
life. Property, however, would inevitably reappear 
shortly after, and probably in the identical shape it 
wore at the period of its abolition. 


THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. 


12 I 


Property is ill-constituted at the present day, be¬ 
cause the source and origin of its actual division was, 
generally speaking, in conquest; in the violence by 
which, at a period remote from our own day, certain 
invading peoples or classes took possession either of 
land or of the fruits of labour not their own. Prop¬ 
erty is ill-constituted at the present day, because the 
bases of the partition of the fruits of a labour 
achieved by both proprietor and workman are not 
laid down in a just and equal proportion to the 
labour done. Property is ill-constituted, because, 
while it confers on its possessor political aud legisla¬ 
tive rights which are denied to the non-possessor, it 
tends to become the monopoly of the few, inaccessi¬ 
ble to the many. Property is ill-constituted, because 
the system of taxation is ill-constituted, and tends to 
maintain the privilege of wealth in the hands of the 
proprietor, while it oppresses the poorer classes, and 
renders saving impossible to them. 

But if, instead of correcting the errors, and slowly 
modifying the constitution of property, you should 
seek to abolish it, you would suppress a source of 
wealth, of emulation, and of activity, and would 
resemble the savage who cuts down the tree in order 
to gather its fruit. 

We must not seek to abolish property because at 
present it is the possession of the few: we must open 
up the paths by which the many may acquire it. We 
must go. back to the principle which is its legitimiza¬ 
tion, and endeavour that it shall in future be the result 
of labour alone. We must lead Society towards es¬ 
tablishing a more equitable basis of remuneration be¬ 
tween the proprietor or capitalist and the workman. 


122 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


We must transform the system of taxation so as to 
exempt the first necessaries of life therefrom, and thus 
render that-economy, which gradually produces prop¬ 
erty, possible to workingmen. And in order that 
these things may be, we must suppress the political 
privilege now conceded to property, and allow to all 
a share in the work of legislation. 

Now, all these things are both just and possible. By 
educating yourselves, and organizing yourselves earn¬ 
estly to demand them and determine to have them, 
you may obtain them; whereas, by seeking the aboli¬ 
tion of property, you would seek an impossibility, do 
an injustice to those who have already acquired it 
through their own labour, and diminish instead of 
increasing production. 

Nevertheless, the abolition of individual property 
is the remedy proposed by many of the Socialist 
systems of which I have spoken to you, and above all 
by Communism. 

Others have gone even further, and observing that 
the Religious idea, the idea of Government, and the 
idea of Country, are disfigured and falsified by relig¬ 
ious error, by class privilege, and dynastic selfishness, 
they demand the abolition of all religion, of all gov¬ 
ernment, and even of Nationality. This is the con¬ 
duct of children or barbarians. Might they not with 
as much reason declare that, disease being frequently 
generated by the corruption of the atmosphere, they 
demand the suppression of every respiratory gas? 

But the teachings of these men, who seek to found 
anarchy in the name of liberty, and to destroy society 
for the sake of the rights of the individual, require no 
further confutation from me to you. The whole of 


THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. 


123 


my work is directed against this guilty dream, which 
is the negation of progress, of duty, of human fra¬ 
ternity, of the solidarity of nations, and of all those 
things which you and I hold in veneration. 

Those who, confining themselves within the limits 
of the economic question, demand the abolition of in¬ 
dividual property, and the organization of commun¬ 
ism, fall into another extreme—the negation of the 
individual and of liberty—which would close the path 
to progress, and (so to speak) petrify Society. 

The following is the general formula of Commun¬ 
ism: 

The property of every element of production, such 
as land, capital (movable or immovable), instruments 
of labour, etc., to be concentrated in the State. The 
State to assign to each man his portion of labour 
and his portion of compensation, some say with abso¬ 
lute equality, others say according to his wants. 

Such a mode of existence, were it possible, would 
be the existence of the beaver, not the life of a man. 

Liberty, dignity, and individual conscience would 
all disappear before this organization of productive 
machines. The satisfaction of the wants of physical 
life may be possible by such means, but intellectual 
and moral life would be entirely destroyed, and with 
it all emulation, all free choice of labour, all liberty 
of association, all the joys of property, and, in short, 
all that stimulates and urges man to production. The 
human family, under such a system, becomes a mere 
human flock or herd, and all that is necessary for it is 
a wide pasture-ground. 

Which of you could reconcile himself to such a pro¬ 
gramme? Equality is thus realized, say they. What 


124 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


equality? Equality in the distribution of labour? 
That is impossible. Labour is in its nature various, 
and cannot be fairly calculated either by its duration 
or by the amount achieved in a given time; but rather 
by its difficulty, or by the more or less agreeable 
nature of the work done, the amount of human vital¬ 
ity it consumes, and its utility to Society. 

How can the equality or difference between an 
hour’s labour passed in a mine, or in purifying the 
stagnant waters of a marsh, and an hour’s labour 
spent in a spinning-factory, be estimated? The im¬ 
possibility of making such calculations fairly has, in 
fact, suggested to some of the founders of these sys¬ 
tems the idea of compelling every man to perform 
in his turn a certain amount of labour in every 
branch of useful activity; an absurd remedy, which 
would render perfection of production impossible, 
while it would be impotent to equalize the weak with 
the strong, the intellectually clever with the slow, 
the man with nervous temperament with the man of 
lymphatic tendency, etc. The labour which is easy 
and welcome to the one becomes irksome and diffi¬ 
cult to the other. 

Would it produce equality in the division of the 
products of labour? 

This also is impossible. Either the equality must 
be absolute (and this would result in great injustice, 
as there would be no distinction remaining between 
the different wants arising from organization, or be¬ 
tween the power and capacity created by a sense of 
duty and the power and capacity given, without 
merit or desert, by nature) or the equality must be 
relative, and calculated according to diversity of 


THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. 


125 


wants, and then, by taking no account of individual 
production, it would violate those rights of property 
which ought to be the reward of the workman’s 
labour. 

Moreover, who should be the Arbitrator and decide 
the just wants of each individual ? Should this Arbi¬ 
trator be the State ? 

Workingmen! brothers! are you disposed to accept 
a hierarchy of head-masters of the common property? 
—masters of the mind through the superiority given 
by an exclusive education, masters of the body from 
their power of determining the work you have to do, 
your capacity to do it, and your wants when it is 
done? Is not this a return to bygone slavery? Would 
not these masters, beguiled by that theory of interests 
of which they were the representatives, and seduced 
by the immense power concentrated in their hands, 
become again the founders of the hereditary dictator¬ 
ship of bygone castes? 

No; Communism would not realize equality among 
the sons of labour; it would not tend to increase pro¬ 
duction 1 —which is the great need at the present day 
-—because it is in the nature of most men, when once 
the means of existence are secured to them, to rest 
satisfied; and the amount of incentive remaining to 
increase production, diffused over all the members of 
society, would be so small as not to have the power 
of rousing and exciting men’s faculties. The quality 

1 It has been calculated that, if one workman among a hundred 
thousand should produce the value of a hundred francs over the 
mean production of the community, he would gain as his own 
share the thousandth part of a franc, or three cents every thirty 
years. Can this be regarded as a stimulus to production ? 



126 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


of proauction would not be improved, as no encour¬ 
agement would be offered to progress in invention, 
which could never be wisely furthered by an uncer¬ 
tain and unintelligent collective direction and organi¬ 
zation. 

The only remedy Communism has to offer for all 
the thousand ills that afflict the sons of the people, is 
security against hunger. 

Now, are there no other means of achieving this? 

Cannot the workman’s right to life and labour be se¬ 
cured without overturning the whole social organism, 
without.rendering production sterile, and without im¬ 
peding progress by destroying individual liberty to 
enchain it thus in a tyrannical, military organization? 

The remedy for your sufferings cannot be found in 
any arbitary general organization, built up in a day 
by any one individual mind, opposed to the univer¬ 
sally received bases of civilization, and suddenly im¬ 
posed by decree. We are not here to create Human¬ 
ity, but to continue it. We may, we ought to, modify 
the organization of its constituent elements, but we 
cannot suppress or destroy them. Humanity rebels, 
and ever will rebel, against the attempt. The time 
spent in an endeavour to realize these illusions would 
therefore be time lost. 

The remedy is not to be found in any increase of 
wages imposed by governmental authority, and, unac¬ 
companied by other changes, tending to increase cap¬ 
ital. An increased rate of wages—that is to say, an 
increase of the cost of production—would carry with 
it an increase in the price of production, a consequent 
diminution of consumption, and hence of work for the 
producers. 


THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. 


I 27 


The remedy is not to be found in any theory tend¬ 
ing to destroy individual liberty, which is the conse¬ 
cration of, and stimulus to, labour, nor in anything 
tending to diminish capital, which is the source and 
the instrument of labour and production. 

The remedy is to be found in the union of labour and 
capital in the same ha?ids. 

When society shall recognize no other distinction 
save the distinction between producers and consumers; 
or rather when every man shall be alike producer and 
consumer; when the profits of labour, instead of being 
parcelled out among that series of intermediates—- 
which (beginning with the capitalists and ending with 
the retailer) frequently increases the price of produc¬ 
tion fifty percent.—shall belong entirely to those who 
perform the labour, all the permanent causes of your 
poverty will be removed. 

Your future depends upon your emancipation from 
the exactions of capital, which is at present the arbi¬ 
trary ruler of a production in which it has no share. 

Your material and moral future. Look around you. 
Wherever you find capital and labour in the same 
hands—wherever the profits of labour are divided 
among the workmen in proportion to the increase of 
those profits and to the amount of aid given by the 
workmen to the collective work—you will find both a 
decrease of poverty and an increase of morality. 

In the canton of Zurig, in the Engadine, and in 
many'other parts of Switzerland, where the peasant 
is a proprietor, and land, capital, and labour are united 
in the hands of a single individual; in Norway, Flan¬ 
ders, and Eastern Friesland; in Holstein, in the Ger¬ 
man Palatinate, in Belgium, and in the Island of 


128 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


Guernsey, on the English coast, there is visible a pros¬ 
perity comparatively superior to all the other parts of 
Europe, where the cultivators are not the proprietors 
of the soil. 

These countries are peopled by a race of agricul- 
turists remarkable for their honesty, dignity, inde¬ 
pendence, and frank and open bearing. 

The mining popufation of Cornwall in England, and 
those American navigators who trade as whalers be¬ 
tween China and America, amongst whom this partici¬ 
pation in the profits of their labour obtains, are rec¬ 
ognized and admitted by official documents to be su¬ 
perior to the workmen who are remunerated by a pre¬ 
determined rate of wages. 

Association of labour, and the division of the fruits of 
labour , or rather of the profits of the sale of its produc¬ 
tions , between the producers , in proportion to the amount and 
value of the work done by each—this is the social future. 

You were once slaves, then serfs, then hirelings. 
You have but to will it, in order shortly to be¬ 
come free producers and brothers, through Asso¬ 
ciation. 

Association—but free, voluntary, and organized on 
certain bases, by yourselves, among men w r ho know, 
esteem, and love each other; not imposed by the force 
of governmental authority, without respect to indi¬ 
vidual ties and affections, upon men regarded rather 
as ciphers and machines of production than as beings 
moved by spontaneous impulse and free will. 

Association—but to be administered with a truly re¬ 
publican fraternity by your own delegates, and from 
which you should be free to withdraw at your own 
discretion; not subject to the despotism of the State 



THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. 


I29 


or of an arbitarily constituted hierarchy, ignorant of 
your individual wants and position. 

An Association of nuclei—groups—to be formed 
according to your own tendencies, and not (as the 
authors of the systems of which I have spoken teach) 
of all the members of a given branch of industrial or 
agricultural activity. 

The concentration of all the members of the State, 
or even of all the citizens of a single city, following a 
given trade, into one sole productive society,would lead 
us back to the bygone tyrannical monopoly of the cor¬ 
porations. It would make of the producer the arbitrary 
judge of prices to the injury of the consumer; legal¬ 
ize the oppression of the minority; shut out the work¬ 
man who might be unsatisfied or discontented with 
its regulations from all possibility of finding work; 
and suppress the necessity of progress, by extinguish¬ 
ing all rivalry in work, and all stimulus to invention. 

Within the last twenty years Association has oc¬ 
casionally been timidly attempted in France, in Bel¬ 
gium, and in England, and it has been crowned with 
success wherever it was commenced with energy, 
resolution, and a spirit of self-sacrifice . 1 

In Association is the germ of an entire social 
transformation, a transformation which, by emanci¬ 
pating you from the servitude of wages, will gradually 
further and increase production and improve the eco¬ 
nomical position of the country. 


1 See, on this subject, Self-help by the People, and The History of 
Cooperation in Halifax , written by G. J. Holyoake (London Book 
Store, 282 Strand) valuable and encouraging little books which 
should be in the hands of working people.—Translator’s Note. 



130 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


The tendency of the present system is to make the 
capitalist seek to increase his gains in order to with¬ 
draw from the arena: while the tendenci T of associa¬ 
tion would be to secure the continuance of labour—• 
that is to say, of production. 

At present the master, the director of the work 
done, who generally owes his position to no special 
aptitude but to mere possession of capital, is liable to 
be improvident, rashly speculative, or incompetent; 
an association, directed by chosen delegates, and 
watched over by all its members, would not run the 
risk of suffering from such errors or defects. 

Under the present system labour is too often di¬ 
rected to the production of superfluities rather than 
necessaries, and owing to a capricious and unjust in¬ 
equality of pay, workmen in one branch of activity 
abound, while they are wanting in another branch. 
The workman, limited to a determinate recompense, 
has no motive to spend all the zeal and energy of 
which he is capable upon his work, in order to multi¬ 
ply and improve its produce. 

Evidently Association would offer a remedy to this 
and many other causes both of interruption and in¬ 
feriority of production. 

Liberty of withdrawal for individual members, 
without injury to the Association —equality of all the 
members in the choice of an elective administration, 
with powers either renewable at a given period, or, 
better, subject to revocation—freedom of admission 
posterior to the foundation of the Association, with¬ 
out the obligation of introducing new capital, but 
with permission to supply its place by an annual con¬ 
tribution to the treasury of the Association, to be de- 


THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. 


* 3 * 

ducted from the profits of the first years of union—• 
indivisbility and perpetuity of the collective capital —such 
an amount of compensation as secures the necessities 
of life equally to all—free distribution of the tools or 
instruments of labour to all, according to the quantity 
and quality of the work done ; such are the general 
bases upon which you must found your associations, if 
you are willing to achieve a work of present self-sacri¬ 
fice for the benefit of the class to which you belong. 

Each of these bases, and above all that concerning 
the perpetuity of the collective capital, which is the 
pledge of your own emancipation and your link with 
future generations; would require a chapter to itself. 
But a special study of the question of workingmen’s 
associations does not enter into the plan of my pres¬ 
ent work. Perhaps, should God grant me some few 
more years of life, I may make of this study a separ¬ 
ate labour of love for you. In the meantime, rest as¬ 
sured that the rules I have just sketched for you are 
the result of deep reflection and earnest study, and 
deserve your attentive consideration. 

But the capital? The capital by which association 
is to be initiated in the first instance; whence to ob¬ 
tain this ? 

It is a grave question, and I cannot treat it at such 
length as I would wish. But I may briefly point out 
your own duty and that of others. 

The first source of that capital is in yourselves, in 
your own economy, your own spirit of self-sacrifice. 
I know the position of too many of you, but there 
are some of you who—either owing to a continuance 
of work or its better compensation—are in a position 
to economise for this aim. Some eighteen or twenty 


132 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


of these might thus collect the trifling sum necessary 
to enable you to commence work on your own 
account. And the consciousness of fulfilling a sol¬ 
emn duty, and thus deserving your emancipation, 
ought to give you strength to do this. 

I might quote for you many industrial associations, 
now well established and flourishing, which were be¬ 
gun by a few workmen with their savings of a penny 
a day. I might relate to you many stories of sacri¬ 
fices heriocally endured in France 1 and elsewhere, 
by the first few workmen who commenced such en¬ 
terprises, and are now in possession of considerable 
capital. There is, indeed, scarcely any difficulty 
which may not be overcome by strong will, when 


1 In 1848, the delegates of some hundreds of workmen who had 
united together with the idea of establishing a pianoforte manufac¬ 
tory upon the Associative principles, finding that a large capital 
was necessary for their undertaking, applied to the Government 
for a loan of 300,000 francs. The application was refused. The 
association was dissolved, but fourteen workmen determined to 
overcome every obstacle and reconstitute it out of their own re¬ 
sources. They had neither money nor credit : they had faith. 

They initiated their society with a capital consisting of tools and 
instruments of labour of the value of about 2,000 francs. But a 
floating capital was indispensable. 

Each of these workmen contrived, not without great difficulty, 
to contribute 10 francs, and other workmen, not belonging to their 
society, added some little offerings to swell their capital. On the 
10th of March, 1849, having collected the sum of 229 francs 50 
centimes, the Association was declared to be founded. 

But their little social fund was insufficient for the cost of start¬ 
ing and the small daily incidental expenses of their establishment. 
Nothing remained for wages, and two months passed without the 
members of the Association receiving a single cent in remunera- 



THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. T33 

sustained by the consciousness of doing good. Al¬ 
most all of you may contribute some trifling aid to 
the primary little fund, either in money, raw mate¬ 
rial, or implements of labour. 

By a consistent course of conduct and habits of 
life, calculated to win the esteem of your companions 
or relations, you may induce them to advance small 
loans, in consideration of which they might become 
shareholders, and receive the interest of their money 
from the profits of the enterprise. 

In many branches of industry in which the price 
of tools or of raw material is trifling, the capital re¬ 
quired for commencing work on your own account is 
small, and you may collect or save it among your- 


tion for their labour. How did they subsist during this time of 
crisis? As workingmen do subsist in periods when they are with¬ 
out work, through help given by their comrades, or by selling or 
pawning their goods. 

Some orders, however, had been executed, and these were paid 
for on the 4th of May, 1849. That day was to the Association 
what the first victory is in war, and they determined to celebrate it. 
Having paid all urgent debts, each associate received a sum of 6 
francs 61 centimes. It was agreed that each should keep 5 francs, 
and that the remainder should be spent in a fraternal banquet. The 
fourteen members, most of whom had not tasted wine for more 
than a year, sat down to a common dinner with their families. 
The cost was 32 sous a family. For another month their wages 
only reached 5 francs a week. In June, however, a baker, either 
a lover of music or a speculator, proposed to buy a pianoforte 
from them, and pay for it in bread. The offer was accepted, and 
the price agreed upon was 480 francs. This was a piece of good 
fortune for the Association, which was thus sure of the first nec¬ 
essary of life. The price of the bread was not considered in the 
wages of the members. Each man received the amount necessary 



THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


J 34 

selves if you resolutely detennine to do so. And it 
will be in every respect better for you that the capi¬ 
tal be all your own, acquired by the sweat of your 
own brows, and of the credit you have gained by con¬ 
scientious work. 

Even as those nations which have achieved their lib- 


for his own consumption, and the married men enough for their 
families. 

By degrees, the Association, the members of which were very 
clever workmen, surmounted the obstacles and privations of the 
first period of its existence. Their books gave excellent testi¬ 
mony to their progress. In the month of August the weekly earn¬ 
ings of each member rose from io to 15 and 20 francs: nor did 
this represent the whole of their profits, for each member paid into 
the common fund a weekly contribution larger than the sum he 
withdrew as wages for his own use. 

On the 30th of December, 1850, the books of the Association re¬ 
vealed the following encouraging facts: 

The members at that dale amounted to thirty-two. 

The establishment was paying 2,000 francs per annum for rent, 
and their premises were already too small for their business. 

The value of the tools, etc., belonging to the Society was 5,922 
francs, 66 centimes. 

The value of their goods and raw material amounted to 22,972 
francs 28 centimes. 

The cash-box of the Society contained bills for 3,540 francs. 
Open credits, almost all good, amounted to 5,861 francs 99 cen¬ 
times. 

Their stock, therefore, amounted to 38,296 francs 93 centimes. 

The Society only owed 4,737 francs 80 centimes of ordinary busi¬ 
ness debts, and 1,65 francs to eighty well-wishers to the Associa¬ 
tion among workingmen in the same trade, for small loans ad¬ 
vanced to the Association at its commencement. 

The net balance in favour of the Society was therefore, 31,- 
909.13 francs. 

Since then the Association has never ceased to flourish. 



THE ECONOMICAL QUESTION. 


*35 


erty by shedding their own blood, are those which best 
know how to preserve it, so your associations will de¬ 
rive a better and more durable profit from the capital 
acquired through your own labour, watchfulness, and 
economy, than from that obtained from any other 
source. This is the nature of things. The Working¬ 
men’s Associations which were founded with govern¬ 
mental aid in Paris in 1848 prospered far less than 
those whose first capital was the fruit of the men’s 
own sacrifices. 

But, although I—loving you too earnestly for servile 
adulation—thus admonish you of the points of weak¬ 
ness which either exist or may arise among you, and 
exhort you to self-sacrifice, this in no way diminishes 
the duties of others towards you. 

Those to whom circumstances have granted wealth 
ought to understand this. They ought to understand 
that the emancipation of your class is a part of the 
Providential design, and that it will be accomplished 
whether with them or against them. Many of them 
do understand it, and amongst these, if you give them 
proofs of an earnest and determined will, and of an 
honest intelligence, you will find help in your under¬ 
takings. They can—and if they are once convinced 
that your endeavour after Association is not the de¬ 
sire of a day, but the faith of a majority among you 
—chey will smooth your path towards obtaining 
credit, either by advances of money, by establishing 
banks giving credit to collective bodies of workmen 
for work to be done, or possibly, by admitting you to a 
share in the profits of their establishments, as an inter¬ 
mediate step between the past and future, which 
might probably enable you to put together the small 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


1 36 

amount of capital necessary for the formation of an 
independent Association. 

In Belgium, banks, called Banks of Anticipation, or 
Banks of the People, already exist, offering such facili¬ 
ties as I have described. In Scotland, also, I believe, 
there are many banks willing to give credit to any 
man of known probity, ready to pledge his own hon¬ 
our, and able to offer the security of one other indi¬ 
vidual of equally good character. And the plan of 
admitting the workmen to a participation in the 
profits of the business has already been adopted by 
several employers with remarkable success. 1 

1 In Paris, for instance, the house-painting establishment of M. 
Leclaire is founded upon this principle, and is well-known for its 
prosperous condition. 



CHAPTER XII. 


CONCLUSION. 

But the State, the Government—an institution only 
legitimate when based upon a mission of education 
and progress not yet understood—the State has a sol¬ 
emn duty towards you, a duty which will be easy of 
fulfillment when we have a really National Govern¬ 
ment, the Government of a free and united people. 

A vast series of means of help might be bestowed 
by the Government upon the people, by which the 
social problem might be solved without spoliation, 
violent measures or interference with the wealth pre¬ 
viously acquired by any of its citizens, and without 
exciting that immoral and unjust antagonism between 
class and class, fatal to the national welfare, which 
visibly retards the progress of France at the present 
day. 

The following would be important and powerful 
modes of assistance : 

The exercise of a moral influence in favour of the 
association of workingmen by the publicly manifested 
approval of the Government agents, by a frequent dis¬ 
cussion of their fundamentary principles in the House 
of Representatives, and by legalizing all the volun¬ 
tary associations constituted on the basis indicated 
above, 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


138 

Improved methods of communication, and the aboli¬ 
tion of the obstacles now impeding the free convey¬ 
ance of produce. 

The establishment of public magazines and depots 
in which the approximate value of the goods or mer¬ 
chandise consigned having been ascertained, the As¬ 
sociations should receive a document or receipt nego¬ 
tiable in the manner of a bank-bill, by which means 
the Associations would be enabled to carry on their 
affairs without the ruinous necessity of an immediate 
sale without regard to prices. 

The concession of the execution of necessary pub¬ 
lic works to Workingmen’s Associations upon equal 
terms to those granted to individual contractors. 

The simplification of judicial forms, justice being at 
present ruinously costly, and too often inaccessible to 
the poor. 

Legal facilities given for the sale and transfer of 
landed property. 

A radical transformation of the system of taxation, 
by the substitution of one sole tax upon income for 
the present complex and expensive system of direct 
and indirect taxation. This would give public and 
practical sanction to the principle of the sacredness of 
human life , for as neither labour, progress, nor the 
fulfillment of duty are possible without life, a given 
amount of money, the amount judged necessary to the 
maintenance of life, should be exempt from all taxa¬ 
tion. 

But there are further means : 

The secularization or appropriation of ecclesiastical 
property by the State—a thing not at present to be 
thought of, yet, nevertheless, inevitable in the future, 


CONCLUSION. 


x 39 


when the State shall assume its true educational mis¬ 
sion—will place a vast sum of wealth in the hands of 
the nation. To this may be added the value of hith¬ 
erto unreclaimed land, and the profits of railways 
and other public enterprises, the administration of 
which should be in the hands of the State; the value 
of the landed property belonging to the communes, 1 
the value of property now descending by collateral 
succession beyond the fourth degree, and which 
should revert to the State, and many other sources of 
wealth which it is unnecessary here to enumerate. 

Suppose all this mass of wealth and resources 
accumulated in the formation of a National Fund, to 
be consecrated to the intellectual and economic prog¬ 
ress of the whole country. Why should not a con¬ 
siderable portion of such a fund be employed (proper 
provision being made to guard against its wasteful 
use or dissipation) as a Fund of Credit, bearing inter¬ 
est at one and a half or two per cent., to be distrib¬ 
uted to the Voluntary Workingmen’s Associations, 
constituted according to the bases indicated above, and 
giving evidence of morality and capacity? This sum 
of capital to be held sacred, not merely to the promo¬ 
tion of labour in the present generation, but in futur¬ 
ity ; its operation being upon so vast a scale as to 
ensure compensation for the occasional inevitable 
losses it would have to sustain. 


1 This property belongs legally to the communes, morally to the 
poor of the communes. I do not mean that such property should 
be taken from the communes, but that it should be consecrated to 
the poor of each commune, and thus constituted, under the super¬ 
vision of elective communal councils, the inalienable Capital of 
Agricultural Associations. 



140 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


The distribution of the Fund of Credit ought not 
to be in the hands either of the Government or of a 
National Central Bank, but of local Banks, adminis¬ 
tered by elective Municipal Councils, under the 
supervision of the Central Government. 

Without subtracting anything from the actual 
wealth of any existing class, and without enriching 
any single class through the medium of that taxation 
which, being contributed by all citizens, should be 
employed for the advantage and benefit of all ; such 
a series of measures as are here suggested, by diffus¬ 
ing credit, increasing and improving production, 
compelling a diminution of the rate of interest, 
and intrusting the progress and continuity of labour 
to the zeal and interest of the producers, would re¬ 
place the limited and ill-directed sum of wealth at 
present concentrated in a few hands, by a wealthy 
nation, directress of its own production and con¬ 
sumption. 

Such, Workingmen, is your future. You may hasten 
this future. Conquer for yourselves your coun¬ 
try, and a truly popular Government, the representa¬ 
tive of your collective life and mission. Organize 
yourselves in a vast league of the people, so that your 
voice shall be the voice of the million, not merely of a 
few individuals. Truth and justice will be on your 
side, and the Nation will listen to you. 

But, be warned! and believe the words of a man 
who has been earnestly studying the course of events 
in Europe during the last thirty years, and who has 
seen the holiest enterprises fail in the hour of prom¬ 
ised success through the errors or immorality of their 
supporters. You will never succeed unless through 


CONCLUSION. 


141 

your own improvement. You can only obtain the exercise 
of your rights by deserving them through your own 
activity and your own spirit of love and sacrifice. 
If you seek your rights in the name of duties fulfilled 
or to fulfill, you will obtain them. If you seek them 
in the name of selfishness, or any theory of happiness 
and well-being propounded by the teachers of mate¬ 
rialism, you will never achieve other than a momen¬ 
tary triumph, to be followed by utter delusion. 

They who appeal to you in the name of well-being 
and happiness, will deceive and betray you. They 
seek only their own well-being and happiness, and 
merely desire to unite with you as an element of 
strength wherewith to overcome the obstacles in their 
own path. When once they have obtained their own 
rights through your help, they will abandon the 
effort to obtain yours in order to enjoy their own. 

Such is the history of the last half-century, and the 
name of this last half-century is, Materialism. 

Sad story of blood and sorrow! I have seen them 
in my own land—these men who denied God, relig¬ 
ion, virtue, and sacrifice, and spoke only in the name 
of the right to happiness and enjoyment —I have seen 
them advance boldly to the struggle with the words 
People and Liberty on their lips, and unite with us 
men of a better faith, who imprudently admitted 
them in our ranks. As soon as a first victory, or the 
opportunity of some cowardly compromise, opened 
the path of enjoyment to them, they forsook the 
cause of the people, and became our bitterest enemies 
the day after. A few years of danger and persecu¬ 
tion were sufficient to weary and discourage them. 

And wherefore should they, men without any con- 


142 THE DUTIES OF MAN. 

scientious belief in a Law of Duty, without faith in 
a mission imposed upon man by a Supreme Power, 
have persisted in sacrifice even to the last years of 
life? 

And I have seen, with deep sadness, the sons of 
the people, educated in materialism by those men, 
turn false to their mission and their future, false to 
their country and themselves, betrayed by some fool¬ 
ish, immoral hope of obtaining material happiness, 
through furthering the caprice or interest of a des¬ 
potism. 

I have seen the workingmen of France stand by, 
indifferent spectators of the coup cTHat of the second of 
December, because all the great social questions had 
dwindled in their minds into a question of material 
prosperity; and they foolishly believed that the 
promises, artfully made to them by him who had 
destroyed the liberty of their country, would be kept. 

Now they mourn over their lost liberty, without 
having acquired even the promised material well¬ 
being. 

No; without God, without the sense of a moral law, 
without morality, without a spirit of sacrifice, and 
by merely following after men who have neither 
faith, nor reverence for truth, nor holiness of life, 
nor aught to guide them but the vanity of their own 
systems—I repeat it with deep conviction—you will 
never succeed. You may achieve dmeutes, but you 
will never realize the true Great Revolution you and 
I alike desire—a revolution, not the offspring and 
illusion of irritated selfishness, but of religious con¬ 
viction. 

Your own vnprovement and that of others ; this must 


CONCLUSION. 


*4 3 


be the supreme hope and aim of every social trans¬ 
formation. 

You cannot change the fate of man by merely em¬ 
bellishing his material dwelling. You will never in¬ 
duce the society to which you belong to substitute a 
system of Association for a system of salary and 
wages, unless you convince them that your associa¬ 
tion will result in improved production and collec¬ 
tive prosperity. And you can only prove this by 
showing yourselves capable of founding and main¬ 
taining associations through your own honesty, 
mutual good-will, love of labour, and capacity of 
self-sacrifice v . 

In order to progress, you must show yourselves 
capable of progress. 

Tradition, Progress, Association. These three 
things are sacred. Twenty years ago I wrote : 

“ I believe in the grand voice of God which the 
Ages transmit to us through the universal tradition 
of Humanity, and it teaches me that the Family, the 
Nation, and Humanity, are the three spheres in 
which the human individual is destined to labour for 
the common good towards the moral perfection of 
himself and others. 

“ It teaches me that property is destined to be the 
manifestation of the material activity of the individ¬ 
ual, of his share in the transformation of the physical 
world; as the franchise is the manifestation of his 
share in the administration of the political world. 

“ It teaches me that the merit or demerit of the 
individual, before God and man, depends upon his 
use of these rights; and it teaches me that all these 
things, being elements of human nature, are peren- 


144 


THE DUTIES OF MAN. 


mally modified and transformed as they gradually 
approach more closely to that ideal of which our 
souls have prevision—but that they can never be can¬ 
celled nor destroyed. 

“ It teaches me that the dreams of Communism, of 
the annihilation or absorption of the individual in the 
social whole, have never been more than fleeting inci¬ 
dents in the life of the human race, reappearing 
momentarily in every intellectual and moral crisis, 
but incapable of realization except upon a trifling 
scale, as in the Christian Monasteries and Convents. 

“ I believe in the eternal progressive life of God’s 
creature; in the progress of Thought and Action, not 
only in the man of the past, but in the man of the 
future. I believe that it is of little comparative im¬ 
port to determine the form and method of the future 
progress, but that it is of great import to open up all 
the paths of progress by bestowing upon mankind a 
truly religious education which will enable them 
to complete it. 

“ I believe that we can never make man worthier, 
more loving, nobler, or more divine—which is in fact 
our end and aim on earth—by merely heaping upon 
him the means of enjoyment, and setting before him 
as the aim of life that irony which is named happi¬ 
ness. 

“ I believe in Association as the sole means we pos¬ 
sess of realizing progress, not merely because it mul¬ 
tiplies the action of the productive forces, but because 
it tends to unite all the various manifestations of the 
human mind, and to bring the life of the individual 
into communion with the collective life of the whole, 
and I know that Association will never be fruitful of 


CONCLUSION. 


*45 


good except among free men and free peoples, con¬ 
scious and capable of their mission. 

“ I believe that man should be able to eat and live 
without having every hour of his existence absorbed 
by material labour, so that he may be able to culti¬ 
vate the superior faculties of his nature; but I listen 
with dread to those who tell you that enjoyment is 
your right, and material well-beitig your aim, because I 
know that such teachings can only produce egoists, 
and that these doctrines have been in France, and 
threaten to be in Italy, the destruction of every noble 
idea, of every sacrifice, and of every pledge of future 
greatness. 

“ The life-destroying evil of Humanity at the present 
day is the want of a common faith, a common 
thought, accepted and admitted by all men, and 
which shall relink earth to Heaven, the Universe 
with God. Deprived of this common faith, man has 
bowed down before lifeless matter and become a 
worshipper of the idol Self-Interest. And the first 
priests of that fatal worship were Kings, Princes, 
and evil Governments. They invented the horrible 
formula of each for himself, for they knew that it 
would increase selfishness, and that there is but one 
step between the egoist and the slave.” 

Workingmen, brothers! avoid that step ! Your 
future depends upon this. 

Yours is the solemn mission to prove that we are 
all the sons of God, and brethren in Him. You can 
only prove this by improving yourselves, and fulfill¬ 
ing your duty. 

I have pointed out to you, to the best of my power, 
what your duties are, the most important being those 

io 


146 


THE DITTIES OF MAN. 


owed to your country. The amelioration of your 
present condition can only result from your partici¬ 
pation in the political life of the Nation. Until you 
can obtain the franchise, your wants and aspirations 
will never be truly represented. 

On the day in which you should follow the ex¬ 
ample of too many French Socialists, and separate 
the social from the political question, saying: “We 
will work out our own emancipation whatever be the 
form of Institution by which our country is governed ” 
—that day you would have yourselves decreed the 
perpetuity of your own social servitude. 

And in bidding you farewell, I will remind you of 
another duty not less solemn than that which binds 
you to achieve and preserve the freedom and unity of 
your Country. 

Your complete emancipation can only be founded 
and secured upon the triumph of a Principle—the 
principle of the Unity of the Human Family. 

At the present day one half of the Human Family 
—that half from which we seek both inspiration and 
consolation, that half to which the first education of 
childhood is entrusted—is, by a singular contradic¬ 
tion, declared civilly, politically, and socially unequal 
and excluded from the great Unity. 

To you who are seeking your own enfranchisement 
and emancipation in the name of a Religious Truth, 
to you it belongs to protest on every occasion and by 
every means against this negation of Unity. 

The Emancipatio 7 i of Woman, then, must be re¬ 
garded by you as necessarily linked with the emanci¬ 
pation of the workingman. This will give to your 
endeavours the consecration of a Universal Truth. 


Howto Win 


A Charming Book for Girls, 

By Miss Prances E. Willard, with an In¬ 
troduction by Miss Rose E. Cleveland. 

Square 12 mo, cloth. Price, $ 1 . 00 , postage 

free. 

Contents : Why I Wrote of Winning; I am 
Little, but I am I; Aimless Reverie vs. a 
Resoluto Aim; The New Profession; The New 
Ideal of Womanhood; The New Ideal of Man¬ 
hood ; The Beautiful; Tho Decalogue of Nat¬ 
ural Law; The Law of Habit; How do you 
Treat your Laundress? Novel Reading; Wo¬ 
man’s Opportunity in Journalism; At what 
Age shall Girls Marry? To the Young Women’s 
Christian Temperance Unions; Unity of Pur¬ 
pose; Finally, Sisters. 

“This book will be eagerly welcomed by a multi¬ 
tude of girls, and cannot fail to do them good.” — 
Woman's Journal, Boston. 

“It breathes the best thoughts and the noblest 
emotions of its gifted author. As a volume to be 
placed in the hands of the young it possesses great 
value.”— Central Baptist, St. Louis. 

“We cordially recommended ‘How to Win’ to 
our fair readers. It will please, it will inform them 
on many important subjects, and in all they will find 
unexpected and inestimable profit.”— National Re¬ 
publican, Washington, D. C. 


FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, 

80 Lafayette Place, New York. 























‘‘ Admirably arranged. ... A 
valitable book of reference in any house¬ 
hold:'—. N.Y.Sun. *- 


E mergency “ff otes; 

OR, 

What to do in Accidents and Sudden 
Illness ti!l the Doctor comes. 

B7 GLENT WORTH It. BUTLER, A.M., M.D., 

Physician to St. Mary’s, St. John’s and Methodist 
Episcopal Hospitals, Brooklyn, N. Y., 
etc., etc. 

12mo, Ciotli. 18 Original Illustrations; over 
100 pp. Price, 50c., postage free. 

This valuable manual, adapted as a text-book 
for societies which make the diffusion of this 
branch of knowledge their sole aim, for schools, 
etc., is admirably suited for everybody's use. 

It gives elementary descriptions of the body 
and its functions, followed by rules and methods 
to be applied in such cases as bleeding, flesh- 
wounds, poisonous bites, fractures and sprains ; 
burns, scalds, and frost-bites ; drowning and 
suffocation ; foreign bodies in throat, nose or 
eye ; convulsions and croup ; unconsciousness 
and swoon ; poisoning from acids, alkalies, ar- 
seuic, iodine, lead, mercury, opium, phosphorous, 
etc. It also tells how to prepare bandages and 
transport the sick and injured. 

Its copious index of over 300 subject references 
render its contents instantly available for the 
emergencies it covers, and which call for ac¬ 
tion on the part of friends or strangers till the 
doctor comes. Life may depend upon assistance 
rendered during the first hour. 

The low price of the book places it within the 
reach of all. 


FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, 

30 Lafayette Place, New York. 














LETTERS from . . . 

HEAVEN 

TWO MOST REMARKABLE BOOKS. 
THE LATTER (LETTERS FROM HELL) 
HAS A STRONG INTRODUCTION 

BY 

George MacPonald, 


The. Christian Guardian says: “Its awful 
descriptions are intensely realistic, and holds you 
by a powerful spell.” 

IN SPIRING 
^ THRILLING ^ 
STARTLING 

The binding of each is appropriate to the theme. 


PRICE, $1.00 EACH, 

POSTAGE FREE. 

If ordered together, $1.75, postage free for both 
books. They should be in every library. 


LETTERS FROM . . . 

-HELL* 

FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, 

30 Lafayette Place, New York. 


























Number One, 

AND 

How to Take Care of Him. 

A Series of Talks oil tlie Art of 
Preserving Health. 

BY JOSEPH J. POPE, M.D., 
Staff-Surgeon Army Royal Artillery; Lecturer 
on the Special Staff of National 
Health Society, London. 


12mo, Cloth, 160 pp. Price, 75c., Postage Free. 


“ Such subjects as Diet, Dress, Ventilation, 
Exercise, are handled in a manner at once 
pleasing and full of instruction that is vital¬ 
ly important. A wide circulation of this 
book is bound to insure three things : better 
bodies, better dispositions, better minds, 
and, we might add, better religion. The au¬ 
thor does not mince matters in discussing 
alcoholic drinks and tobacco .”—Christian 
Messenger. 

“This series of talks on the art of preserv¬ 
ing the health is marked by sterling com¬ 
mon sense and a mastery of sanitary sci¬ 
ence.”— The Interior, Chicago. 

“This book deserves much praise and a 
wide circulation. Its author, evidently from 
his extensive official practice in England, 
knows what he proposes to teach, and has 
made sanitary science a specialty. . . Well 
worth reading, and full of sound precepts 
and useful truths .”—The Brooklyn Eagle. 


FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, 

30 Lafayette Place, New York. 


J 















To Dance or Not to Dance. 


THE 

Qance of Modern Society. 

By William Cleaver Wilkinson. 

Revised Edition. 16mo, Cloth. Price, 
60 Cents, Postpaid. 

A v ork that will prove invaluable to all who can¬ 
not settle this disputed question of Dancing. 
They will hail a clear, vigorous and thorough 
treatment of the question. It treats the 
dance of modern society (1), as to its bearing 
on health ; (2), its relation to economy ; (3), its 
social tendency; (4), its influence upon intel¬ 
lectual improvement, and (5), its religious as¬ 
pects. 

“Most pungent and powerful.”— Rev. Dr. Cuy- 
ler, in The Evangelist. 

“ Deserving of extensive circulation.”— Stand¬ 
ard, Chicago. 

“Everywhere acknowledged to be able and 
incisive.”— Advance. 

“Those who read it will find material for 
profitable meditation.”— Spy, Worcester. 

“Written with great cogency and elegance. 
. . . Read it, and circulate it.”— Zion's Herald. 

“We like his style. He strikes to hit. He 
‘goes for ’ his opponent.”—Troy Press. 

“Mr. Wilkinson handles his subject boldly, 
without coarseness ; wittily, without flippancy ; 
piously, without cant.”—W. Y. Daily Times. 

“The most pungent attack on the modern 
dance we have ever read. We have looked with 
interest, but in vain, for a defense of the ac¬ 
cused against this most eloquent indictment.”— 
Harper's Magazine. 


FUNK Sc WAGNALLS COMPANY, 

30 Lafayette Place, New York. 














7dwin Arnold 

AS 

POETIZER AND AS PAGANIZER. 

Containing an Examination of “ The Light 
of Asia ” for its Literature and 
for its Buddhism. 

By Prof. William Cleaver Wilkinson, D.D. 


12mo, 177 pp. Cloth. 75 cts., Post Free. 


This book must prove of continued usefulness 
in laying: bare some of the descrepancies of the 
poem which has wielded so wide an influence, as 
also in disclosing some of the most questionable 
teachings of the ism that holds so vast a sway. 
The following from the comments of the press 
will indicate the scope and merit of the work : 

“It must be regarded as a complete refuta¬ 
tion of the alleged claims of Buddhism to a posi¬ 
tion of substantial equality with Christianity.” 
— Tribune , Chicago. 

“As a piece of destructive criticism it is un¬ 
surpassed in English literature.” — Examiner , 
New York. 

“ Mr. Wilkinson strikes his foe with a smile and 
a bow, and with true knightly good nature, but 
his rapier is sharp both at the point and along 
the edge. . . . He deserves well f or his assiduous 
examination into the lacts, and for the full and 
complete way in which he has gone over the 
whole poem .”—The Independent, New York. 


Price, together with Manilla-bound Copy of 
“The Light of Asia,” 90c., Post Free. 


FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY. 

30 Lafayette Place, New York. 















THE *11*11, JRE THOllS or WORK 
J.A’/i HISTORY OF THE 

Salvation Army. 

By Mrs. Maud B. Booth, wife of General 

Ballington Booth, Marshal Commanding 
United States Forces. 12mo, cloth, 288 
pages. Price, $1.00, post free. 

This volume furnishes its readers with every 
needful particular concerning this growing or¬ 
ganization of over 1,000,000 adherents, which, 
having spread out its branches throughout 
Great Britain, is making rapid progress also in 
the United States. 

Gen. Clinton B. Fisk said: “I have been 
instructed and inspired by reading this book.” 

The New York Herald says: “It cannot 
fail to make the reader more kindly disposed to¬ 
wards the strange bands of revivalists.” 

Joseph Cook says: “It is a profoundly de¬ 
vout and suggestive record of timely and cour¬ 
ageous Christian work.” 

Prof. C. H. Briggs, D.D.: “ Written in beau., 
tiful style, healthful in tone, full of valuable in¬ 
formation. I have studied the Salvation Army 
some years and am convinced it is one of the 
most powerful agencies for evangelization that 
has been organized in this century.” 

Prof. William Cleaver Wilkinson, D.D.: 

“The book cannot fail to do good wherever it 
is read. It has done me good, and I thank the 
author for it.” 


FUNK Sc AVAGNALLS COMPANY, 

30 Lafayette Place, New York. 





A 


I-V® 


POPULAR SCIENCE. 




NATURE 

STUDIES 

. . . EDITED BY . . . 

PROF. R. A. PROCTOR. 


A Series of Popular Scientific Expositions 
bv Grant Allen, Richard A. Proctor, 
Andrew Wilson, Thomas Foster, and 
Edward Clodd. With copious Index. 


12nto, 264 pi». Paper, 25c.; Cloth, $1, Postage Free. 


Contents: 


Charles A. Darwin. 
Newton and Darwin. 
Dreams. 

Honey Ants. 

Color of Animals. 

A Winter Weed. 

A Poisonous Lizard. 
Birds with Teeth. 

The Fiji Islands. 
Hyacinth Bulbs. 

Onr Unbidden Guests. 
The First Daffodil. 


Strange Sea Monsters. 
Origin of Buttercups. 
Found Links. 
Intelligence in Animals. 
Our Ancestors. 

Beetle’s View of Life. 
What is a Grape ? 
Germs of Disease. 

A Wonderful Discovery. 
Brain Troubles. 
Thought Reading. 
Monkshood. 


“Replete with interest and general information 
wrested from the tight grasp of nature.”— Interior , 
Chicago. _ 

FUNK & 4VAGNALLS COMPANY, 

30 Lafayette Place, New York. 














Forewarned is Forearmed. 

f rans for the y ohm 

By ANTEONY COMSTOCK, 

Of the Society for the Suppression of Vice in New 
York, author of “Frauds Exposed,” etc. 


12mo, Cloth, 253 pp. Price, $1.00, Postage Free. 


CONTENTS. 


Household Traps. 
Half-D ; me Novels and 
Story Papers. 
Advertisement Traps. 
Gambling Traps. 
Death Traps by Mail. 


Free Love Traps. 
Quack Traps. [Traps. 
Artistic and Classical 
Infidel Traps, Liberal 
Conclusion. [Traps. 
Appendix. 


‘“Trapsfor the Young’ has interested me 
exceedingly as an authoritative, incisive and 
courageous exposure of some of the most 
ghastly evils of cities. Mr. Comstock has no 
equal on this continent in knowledge of his 
subject. His moral heroism, his keen sagacity, 
his unflinching perseverance in his warfare 
with the corrupters of youth, make him one of 
the princes among reformers .”—Joseph Cook. 


FUNK & WACNALLS COITIPANV, 

30 Lafayette Place, New York. 




























SCIENCE 


IN 


Short Chapters 

By W. Mattieu Williams, F.B.A.S., 

A leading English scientist. Author of “ Fuel of 
the Sun,” “ Through Norway with 
a Knapsack,” etc. 


12mo, Cloth, 308 pp. Price, $1.00, Postage Free. 


Partial Contents; Origin of Soap; Con¬ 
sumption of Smoke ; Fuel of the Sun ; Origin 
of Lunar Volcanoes; Solidity of the Earth ; 
Formation of Coal; World Smashings ; Air 
of Stove-heated Rooms; Solar Eclipse of 
1871; Great Ice Age; Count Rumford’s 
Cooking Stoves; Science and Spiritualism ; 
Origin of Petroleum ; Corrosion of Building 
Stones. _ 

‘“Science in Short Chapters’ supplies a 
growing want among a large class ol busy 
people, who have no time to consult scientific 
treatises. Written in clear and simple style. 
Very interesting and instructive.— .Journal 
of Education, Boston. 

“ The style is free from technicalities, and 
the book will prove interesting and instruc¬ 
tive.”— Christian Advocate, blew York. 

“Mr. Williams has presented these scien¬ 
tific subjects to the popular mind with much 
clearness and force. It may be read with 
advantage by those without special scientific 
training.”— The Academy, London, Eng. 


FUNK & WAGNALL8 COMPANY, 

30 Lafayette Place, New York. 









"Should reach its hundred-thousandth 
edition — Chicago Journal . 


ETHICS OF MARRIAGE 

A Most Valuable Book 


By H. S. Pomeroy, M. D. Prefatory note by Thos. 
Addis Emmet, M. D., LL. D., and introduction by 
Rev. J. T. Duryea, D. D., Boston. With an Ap¬ 
pendix showing the laws of most of the States and 
Territories regarding certain forms of crime. 

12mo, Cloth, 150 pp,, Price, $1.00, 

POSTAGE FREE. 

“To the earnest man and woman everywhere,who 
has watched the reckless manner in which marriages 
are contracted, the wicked way in which responsi¬ 
bilities are shifted and ignored, and the slow and 
sure defilement of society because the criminal 
classes are allowed to propagate their vile species, 
while Christian households and moral parents ignore 
their duty to this and to the next world, this book is 
almost like a voice from Heaven. Should reach its 
hundred-thousandth edition.”— Chicago Jaurnal. 

“It deserves to lie alongside the Bible in the 
foundation of each home.”— Rev. 0. P. Gifortl, 
Boston. 

“I have read your book with deep interest and 
heartily concur in' it. . . . May God bless your 
words .''—Elizabeth A. Tobexj , Pres. Mass. W. C. T. U. 

“A subject of great delicacy and yet commanding 
present importance is treated with the utmost pro¬ 
priety of tone and expression ; with adequate know¬ 
ledge, both theoretical and practical; with unflinch¬ 
ing thoroughness and courage in the exposure of the 
evil, and with a reformatory purpose worthy of both 
the man of science and the Christian.”— Rev. Joseph 
Cook. 


FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, Publishers, 

30 Lafayette Place, New York. 
















OLIVER 

CROMWELL 

HIS LIFE, TIME, BATTLE-FIELDS, 
AND CONTEMPORARIES. 

By RF.V. PAXTON HOOD. 


1 2mo, Cloth, 286 pp. Price. $1.00, 
Postage Free. 


“Mr. Hood’s biography is a positive boon 
to the mass of readers, because it presents a 
more correct view of the great soldier than 
any of the lives published, whether we com¬ 
pare it with Southey’s, Guizo’s, or even 
Forster’s .”—New York Sun. 

“A valuable biography of Cromwell, told 
with interest in every part, and with such 
condensation and skill in arrangement that 
prominent events are made clear to all.”— 
Christian Union, New York. 

“ Hood’s ‘ Cromwell’ is an excellent account 
of the great Protector. Cromwell was the 
heroic servant of a sublime cause. A complete 
sketch of the man and the period .”—New York 
Daily Graphic. 


FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, 

30 Lafayette Place, New York. 























A NEW HISTORICAL BOOK. 


H OURS WITH 

Living Hen and Women 

OF THE 

Revolution. 

By Benson J. Lossing, the celebrated historian. 
It is one of his quaintly dramatic productions. 
It treats of personal interviews with living 1 
men and women of the Revolution, from whom 
are gathered choice memories and incidents 
of importance contiguous with the birth and 
growth of this Republic. Illustrated with the 
fac-similes of pen and ink drawings made by 
the author when interviewing the personages 
forty-eight years ago. This feature is unique, 
original, and has historic value. 

Square 12mo. Cloth, elegantly bound. Price, 
$1.50, post-paid. 

PARTIAL CONTENTS: The Fifer at Lexing¬ 
ton ; The Fair Courier ; Montcalm’s Errand 
Boy ; The Patriotic Widow of the Congaree ; The 
Cicerone of Ticouderoga ; The Child Captive of 
Wyoming; Flora Macdonald ; I)r. Franklin’s 
Errand Boy; Washington's Last Surviving 
Bondwoman ; The Rescued Baby ; The Spy of 
the Neutral Ground, and ten other chapters. 

“Delightful are the contents of this book. . . . 
Has a permanent value.’’— Public Opinion. 

“A new as well as a valuable contribution to 
the history of the Revolution.”— New York Sun. 

“It is crowded with illustrations.”— News % 
Baltimore. 

“Delightful entertainment for thousands of 
readers.”— Republic , Philadelphia. 

“ Has a wonderful freshness.”— Independent , 
New York . _ 

FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, 

30 Lafayette Place, New York. 








BETTER NOT 


A GOOD BOOK 

By Bishop J, H. Vincent, D,D„ LL.D, 

Chancellor of Chautauqua University. 

1 «no, Clotlt. Price, 50 Cents, Postpaid. 



The Chancellor of the famous Chautauqua Uni¬ 
versity needs no introduction to the reading 
public. “ Better Not ” analyses the subject of 
the dance, the theatre, the card-table, the 
w\ne-flask, and kindred matters in such a way 
as to induce its readers to echo back its title, 
“Better Not,” with the warmth of sincere ap¬ 
proval. 

To Parents : “ What policy in reference to the 
dance, the theater, the card-table, and the 
wine-glass, shall parents adopt—parents who 
are anxious to act with the highest wisdom in 
the training of their children, and to promote in 
them strength and nobility of character, habit¬ 
ual self-denial, and earnest effort for the good of 
others ? ”— By the Author. 

To Young People : “ What policy in reference 
to the dance, the theater, the card-table, and 
the wine-glass, shall young people adopt—young 
people who are anxious to act with the highest 
wisdom, respect, and affection toward their pa¬ 
rents, and who are ambitious to attain strength 
of character and to set the safest and best ex¬ 
ample to their friends and companions in soci¬ 
ety ? ”— By the Author. 

“ We like his volume.”— N. 7. Herald. 

“ Will be of great moral advantage.”— Herald 
of Gospel Liberty. 

“Frank, fair and effective.”— Christian Advo¬ 
cate^ Nashville. 

“ Timely, fair and sensible.”— Central Baptist. 

“ May profitably be considered.” — Brooklyn 
Daily Eagle. 

FUNK Sc WAGNALLS COMPANY, 

30 Lafayette Place, New York. 



















< 


LIFE OF . • . 



EN. CLINTON B. FISK 


PREPARED BY 

PROF. A. A. HOPKINS. 

The life of a man of national repute. His 
remarkable career from boyhood, through 
his business and military life, to his nomi¬ 
nation for Prohibition President of the 
United States. The biography has been 
brought down to the time of death and 
burial of the General. 12mo, cloth, about 
300 pages. Illustrated with excellent por¬ 
trait. Price, $1.00, postage free. 


This Biography, prepared (with the General’s 
approval) by Prof. Hopkins,. who enjoyed free 
access to all the General’s private papers, is very 
accurate and complete. It is of permanent and 
standard value to the American people. It is purely 
American in its examples, patriotic in all its teach¬ 
ings, and will inculcate iu the rising generation the 
deepest self-respect, and excite to greater energies 
the noblest ambitions. It is the record of a self- 
made man; the biography of a typical American 
life; a charming story, reaching from the log cabin 
of a pioneer to positions of national honor. 

Our expectations of great things in the detail and 
progress of his life are never disappointed. Nor is 
It surprising to learn of his intimacy with such men 
as Lincoln, Greeley, and Grant; his distinguished 
service in the Civil War, wherein he won his well- 
earned commissions; his endearment to both the 
whites and blacks of the South, and his popularity 
among the mixed multitude of the North, East, and 
West; his splendid business ,career, and noble 
Christian activities; his championship in many 
patriotic movements; his eminent social qualities, 
eloquent oratorical abilities, philanthropic spirit, and 
his» well-known temperance principles. 


FUNK Sc WAGXALLS COMPANY, 

30 Lafayette Place, New York. 































t( In many ways a remarkable book ."— 
R. S. MacArthur, D.D. 

SUNRISE 
ON THE SOUL. 


* * 
* 


A SERIES OF ESSAYS, ETHICAL 
AND PRACTICAL. 


By Hugh Smith Carpenter, D.D., 

Author of "Here and Beyond," etc. 


12mo, Cloth, 329 pp. Price, $1.25, Postage Free. 


4 

3 

" 




k 

; 

» 

: 

: 


“It is a book which one might call a garden of 
the soul for the richness, the beauty, and the variety 
of its flowers of illustration. . . Its allusions to 

astronomy are beautiful and eloquent, and the book 
is clothed in most beautiful language .”—Brooklyn 
Eagle. _ 

Partial Contents : Thought Force, Thought 
Poise, Intuition, Limitation, Intention, Crudity, 
Perversion, Fallacy, Uselessness, Egotism, Selfdom, 
Soul Drunkenness, Soul Insanity, ftelf-Hell, Eman¬ 
cipation, Light of Life, Revolution, Transfer, Trans¬ 
formation,Purpose, Direction,Narrowness, Intensity, 
Alertness, Timeliness, Ease, Endurance. Value of 
Failures, Good Humor, Sex, Marriage Meaning, 
Memories, Symbolic Truth, Eventide, The Dove on 
the Deep, Mystery, The Marvelous, Natural Super¬ 
natural, Glance and Glimpse, Element and Essence, 
True Agnosticism, Neighbor Beings, Angel Aid, 
Form, Recognition, True Materialism. 


“ Thoughtful minds will read it with wonder and 
delight, as new light and beauty burst forth from 
its pages and suffuse them as with a heavenly glow.” 
Jas. M. Sherwood , D.D. 


FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, 

30 Lafayette Place, New York. 




















